MacBook Spotlight taking forever to index

[cosajs]

Worked for me!

that you have installed third-party spotlight plugins, i.e. from Microsoft Office.

All plugins are trying to index files they might know about.

If one of these plugins is badly written, they crash and the indexing will start again and loop.

There are a few command line tools you could use to check wether this is the case:

a) List available plugins on your system

mdimport -L

b) Show the status of the indexing process:

mdutil -s -a -v

c) force clean rebuild of the index (after you posted the output of above commands)

mdutil -a -E

d) Check /var/log/system.log

you might look into that file to check for message of spotlight, or mds the importing daemon.

Very good, worked for me, did not do the command line prompts but saw that it could be "All plugins are trying to index files they might know about.
If one of these plugins is badly written, they crash and the indexing will start again and loop."

So i thought about what i might have done to cause this, it was because i had deleted a folder of Microsoft Word. Just re - installed MS office and now is working again, index is taking 3 hours now

 

[Arizona_Joe]

It might be
There are a few command line tools you could use to check whether this is the case:
a) List available plugins on your system mdimport -L
b) Show the status of the indexing process: mdutil -s -a -v
c) force clean rebuild of the index (after you posted the output of above commands) mdutil -a -E
d) Check /var/log/system.log
you might look into that file to check for message of spotlight, or mds the importing daemon.

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Hello, five years and two months after this post..! I'm having exactly this problem, in a big way. Has brought a key drive (and all its projects) to its knees. Spotlight is giving me the ever-changing but never-ending "time remaining" messages (3 hours, 12 days, etc.... most often 12 days and so).... and everything is tied up with that, disk always going, CPU always burdened, no sleep mode, etc. • Putting that drive in Spotlight's Privacy window stops it. But I do want full search functions on that drive. • So I have run your strings up there, and I have a pretty long list (2-3 dozen) of plugins... some under System/Library, some under Library/, some under folders specific to specific programs. These include MSOffice and iWord, neither of which is installed on this machine (for reasons like this... and/or at least because I knew Office was overly invasive in other ways, e.g. fonts). • So... can I or should I delete some like that? (Tried those two; nothing changed.) And/or should I delete them all?? Will they get rebuilt as needed? • THANK YOU.

 

[estherau]

It took spotlight about 12 months to index my studio mac with external drives attached with about 40tb of data and another for the Time Machine which maybe doesn't index. I don't know. but anyway during those 12 months my studio mac could hardly even draw a finder window - took ages to open things. now faster sit finally finished indexing. whew!

 

[estherau]

It took all the fun out of doing things- as during that 12 months i decreased my use of my computer.