Okay, so I’ve been messing around with my Mac’s Spotlight search lately, trying to make it work a little better for me. You know how it is – sometimes Spotlight is super helpful, other times it feels like it’s indexing everything except what I actually need. I stumbled upon this thing called “Spotlight cache schedule” and figured I’d give it a shot.
My Little Experiment
First, I had to figure out what the heck was going on with my current setup. Basically, I wanted to see when Spotlight was doing its indexing thing. I’m not always techy, and I do simple work and records.
So, the first thing I did was open up Activity Monitor. It’s like a control panel, you can see all the processes running on your Mac. I made sure I was on the “CPU” tab, so I could see what was hogging all the processing power. And sure enough, there were these two guys: “mds” and “mdworker”. I learned those are the processes that Spotlight uses for indexing.
I watched them for a while, writing down the times when they were really active. Like, I’d see “mds” jump up to 20% CPU usage, then “mdworker” would kick in. I did this over a couple of days, just to get a feel for the pattern. Plain and simple, just checking how they go, like Monday morning around 9 AM, then again in the afternoon, and sometimes randomly at night.
Changing Things Up
Next up, I want to change the schedule of the Spotlight, my idea is let the indexing thing run at night, so the Mac will run more smooth in day time.
Then, I opened up Terminal – that black box with the text. I’m not very good at Terminal, I just use it for some simple commands.
I typed in some commands that, to be honest, I don’t fully understand. But they basically told my Mac to change when Spotlight does its thing. The command I used was something like this (but I had to look it up online, of course):
- sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/*.* (This stops the current schedule)
- sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/*.* (This loads the new schedule time)
I won’t go into the details of that here because I just copy and do, maybe I’ll share about the meaning of the command later, I will keep my eyes on it.
I basically created a new schedule, telling Spotlight to only index when I’m usually asleep, I set time during 2 AM to 5 AM. I picked those times because I’m almost never using my computer then.
Did It Work?
After making these changes, I went back to Activity Monitor to see if it actually worked. And, lo and behold, “mds” and “mdworker” were mostly quiet during the day! They were still popping up, but way less frequently. Then, when I checked late at night (or rather, early in the morning), there they were, chugging away, doing their indexing thing. And, after several days of testing, the Spotlight runs much quicker, and no more hang up during day time.
So, yeah, that’s my little Spotlight experiment. It’s not exactly rocket science, and I’m sure there are more sophisticated ways to do this. But it seems to have made a difference for me, and that’s all I really wanted. It just made my computer feel a bit snappier, and Spotlight seems to find what I need a little faster. Good result!
