I have a couple of PowerBook G4 laptops that are now running Leopard. I keep them closed, in sleep mode, most of the time, often for days at a time, as I’m doing most of my work on faster Macs now. When I do open them up to do something, I often find that they are slowed to a crawl by a “find” process madly searching the disk and using most of the CPU power for the next hour or so. Just when I want to use the computer, it’s too busy to be usable.
What’s happening? I discovered that Leopard updates the “locate” database in its weekly cron script. For a computer that’s on most of the time, that generally happens when it’s idle and I’m not around to care if the computer is slow. If it misses that time because the computer wasn’t on, it runs the job as soon as it wakes up. Right when I want to use it.
So, in addition to Spotlight hogging up the computer, Leopard builds a redundant, Unix-style file database, too. Yes, I was involved in writing that stuff for GNU/Linux, but on Macs I almost never want to run “locate”. You’d think Apple would rewrite it as a Spotlight front-end.
On Mac laptops (excuse me, notebooks), I now edit /etc/defaults/periodic.conf and set
weekly_locate_enable=”NO”
On the slower ones, I also turn Spotlight off completely (I think), by running (with sudo) the commands I found in this tip:
launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
I use EasyFind if I really need to find a file. It produces more usable results than Spotlight does, anyway.
Now my laptops have enough spare CPU time for me to use them again. Thanks, Leopard.
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