This is a technical question, maybe you have some idea…
When Ableton is running, more frequently than not, system (including Ableton) becomes unusably slow. Sometimes it’s ok sometimes it’s not… But according to Activity Monitor, culprit seems to mds_stores, that is, Spotlight.
When I disable Spotlight alltogether, things seem to be much nicer, at the expense of, well, not being able to use Spotlight (which I do need for my work and private life related endeavours)
Do you have any idea how to solve this conundrum?
Does excluding some folders from Spotlight help? (which folders?)
Is there an utility which disables Spotlight when a certain app (ie Ableton) is running, and re-enables it when it’s not running?
I’ve been using MacOS for years and never had that issue with Spotlight, which I also use often. Excluding searches from Spotlight may help (if it’s even possible) but seems more like applying a band-aid rather than dealing with the root cause.
That issue can often occur when you restore a Mac onto a Mac onto a Mac, etc, but also just over time if you have a lot of small files, etc.
Follow the first article below and it should be resolved, but leave it on overnight for a day or two, to finish the re-index process
. It’s a good idea to run Disk Utility afterwards - using First Aid on “All Devices” after starting up in Recovery gives most bang per buck.
You might want to look at App Tamer. You can limit apps and processes to only use a certain percentage of the CPU, e.g. limit Dropbox to using maximum 25%. I’m almost certain that you can specifically limit Spotlight in this way as well as any other apps or processes that are running, It’s paid but pretty cheap and works well. I’ve only used it on an Intel Mac but the latest version is universal/M1 native.
You definitely don’t need an app to manage Spotlight, your issue is literally a software glitch that’s easily sorted. Throttling a glitch isn’t going to fix it, it’s just going to make it worse.
Is that a new mac? it could be indexing for couple of days… personally never had issues with this other then when my mac was new…
you could try replacing spotlight with Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com/) which works lightning fast and is free unless you want the “power pack” which is not required at all…
Interesting, I always had this kind of issues, on different machines, across macOS reinstalls, etc. Probably it’s related to how I use my computer, but I still think it’s a macOS bug.
