July 24, 2022
Are you using the Spotlight feature on your Mac? If not, here’s a quick way to extend battery life and speed up your system.
Spotlight uses a background process called mdworker
to
index your disk. Especially on older Macs, and especially after changing
lots of files on your disk, you may have been bitten by said process
munching CPU one or the other time.
There’s a command-line tool called mdutil
that can be
used (with sudo
) to manage the indexing process. You can
view the indexing status of all your disks using
sudo mdutil -as
(-a
to apply the command to
all stores on all volumes, -s
to display indexing
status).
Finally, to switch it off on all volumes, run:
$ sudo mdutil -a -i off
You can verify using sudo mdutil -as
again and enjoy a
more quiet Mac experience.