Sped up my iMac with a mdutil command

[b0b]

The Finder window on my iMac has been really slow. Today I may have discovered why. Finder uses a program called Spotlight to do searches. Spotlight constantly updates an indexed database of file metadata with a service called mds. With me so far?

In Activity Monitor, I saw that mds was using a lot of processor time. I used mdutil to turn off indexing and the Finder search function quit working. Not good - I use that all the time. I turned indexing back on and noticed that it was indexing my external USB backup drive. What da? That drive is huge (2 TB) and slow, and I almost never look at it. Luckily there's a mdutil command to disable indexing of individual volumes. Here it is:
<pre>
sudo mdutil -i off "/Volumes/WD Backups"</pre>
Type that into a terminal window with the name of the drive that you want to disable (mine is WD Backups). Suddenly my iMac is fast again! There's a manpage with a list of the mdutil commands. Check it out.

<pre> man mdutil</pre>

If anyone thinks this is a bad idea, let me know. I just discovered this subsystem today. I might have just enough rope to shoot myself in the foot!

[Ian Rae]

I might have just enough rope to shoot myself in the foot!

Now that bit I do understand.