48 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
+++
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date = "2011-06-27"
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title = "Your Mac slow? Disable Spotlight in Snow Leopard"
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tags = ["MacOSX", "spotlight", "diskio"]
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slug = "your-mac-slow-disable-spotlight-in-snow-leopard"
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+++
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For some time now I've experience my mac to be very slow. Opening Vim would take minutes. Creating a new Tab in iTerm would take more than 20 seconds. What the hell is going on - this is a brand new MacBook Pro!
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~
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After investigating, using _Activity Monitor_ I discovered the following:
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* CPU's idling at 3-5% usage
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* +500M free RAM
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* +200G free disk space
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* Negligible amount of network traffic
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* Very high amount of disk I/O writes (> 450w/s)
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### What's causing disk I/O?
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So, something is using my disk. But what? The solution is to use the `iotop` utility:
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``` shell
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sudo iotop -C 5 12
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```
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A common entry here is the `mds` procoess, which has an insane amount of `BYTES`. So, this `mds` process is causing a lot of I/O, causing things to get slow.
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### What's the `mds` process do?
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A quick Google search reveals that the `mds` process is actually the Spotlight indexer service.
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### Disable Spotlight
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I don't use Spotlight at all, so let's disable it - preventing the disk I/O.
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``` shell
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sudo mdutil -a -i off
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```
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That's all. Spotlight indexing disabled. After a few seconds the disk I/O dropped from ± 450w/s to 0w/s. Vim starts ups again within a seconds. I'm happy.
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### Enabling Spotlight
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If, for some obscure reason, you want to re-enable Spotlight, use the following command:
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``` shell
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sudo mdutil -a -i on
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```
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