damians personal blog

sometimes spotlight turns foolish when you connect an external harddrive. you notice that your harddrive is under continous usage, the cpu usage is nearly 100% all the time, and a process with the name mds is using up your cpu.

the remedy to this situation is to turn spotlight indexing off for the specific volume. this can be done with the command mdutil.

there are several options to mdutil: mdutil [-pEs] [-i on | off] volume ...
volume ist the path to the volume, i.e. /Volumes/MacHD/
-i sets the indexing status
-E erases the store (database)
-s shows the indexing status

so to find out what status your drives are, you can run
sudo mdutil -s /Volumes/*

if you turn the indexing off for a volume, you might want to remove the store also to free up drive space:
sudo mdutil -E -i off /Volumes/ExternalDrive/

be careful about removing stores, it will take some time till they are rebuild from scratch. but sometimes spotlight behaves buggy, and then your only choice is to remove the store and begin over.

        21.Sep.2005, 16:27 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (0)

today i wondered why the dialogs are so slow on my mac mini. then it occurred to me that on my ibook i used a micro-hack to speed up appearance and disappearance time of certain dialog boxes.


this sets the animation time to what i think is the lower limit. if you enter a smaller time value, the animation will not look fluent any more. you might also set it to .001, which will not animate the dialogs anymore but they merely pop onto your screen.

a very nice variation is also to view the animation in full length and detail by setting the value to something like 2.0. with this setting, though, it is impossible to work productively. and if you perfectly liked the rather cosy speed of os x by default, then you can reset the value to .2.

for more defaults write tips, see the blog entry useful defaults write.

        11.Sep.2005, 2:38 :: mac os x :: Permalink :: Comments (0)