Few of my friends are whining about how slow their Mac runs. It doesn’t matter how powerful your CPU, or how many RAM you got, Snow leopard tend to get slower and slower. I’ve done few researches and found out that, spotlight and MD’s are the things to blame. Yes, that’s why regardless your CPU and RAM my Mac is getting slower, it is because the bottleneck is in the disk! Spotlight and MD’s are abusing my disk IO. When the disk is very busy, the overall system will get slow, especially when spotlight is indexing.
I have decided to turn off spotlight and MD’s completely, mostly because spotlight is useless to me. I never use it so I don’t mind to loose it. Here’s what I did to disable spotlight and MD’s completely (including removing the spotlight icon on the top-right corner).
Turn off MDUtil
1 | sudo mdutil -a -i off |
Stop Spotlight
1 | sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist |
Change the permission so spotlight won’t start at startup.
1 | sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search |
Restart UI Server to remove spotlight icon
1 | sudo killall SystemUIServer |
Caution : This tutorial modify some system files. Use at your own risk 
Rapid Gigabitz
March 23, 2011 at 7:49 AM
i approve it Snow Leopard : paralyze Spotlight Completely « Evilangelist now im your rss reader