Apple’s Spotlight can be an awesome tool… when it’s working properly. If it stops working properly, it can bring your system to its knees, causing extreme slow-downs.
Spotlight is so tightly integrated into OS X, and many Apple applications, that when it’s not working properly, you can see your processor usage jump to 100% while doing nothing, and simply browsing through folders, or email messages will result in the spinning beach ball of death.
Back in December (05) I told you how to force Spotlight to reindex your drive, by using the privacy tab, in the Spotlight Preference Pane. Sometimes, if the Spotlight index files get corrupted, this method doesn’t work. Luckily, The guys over at The X Lab have written up a handy little tutorial page, showing us some extremely useful Terminal commands that can fix many problems.
It’s definitely worth a look if your Spotlight doesn’t seem to zippy anymore.