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TheTraveller · Feb 16, 2005, 04:11 PM

Hey all, did anyone see this?

http://www.betanews.com/article/Appl...ger/1108409315

If you read the article, it says developers have expressed concerns over the speed of Spotlight. What are they talking about, any idea?

Chris Grande · Feb 16, 2005, 04:20 PM

I think they are talking about the initial indexing speed. The newer builds don't let you search until the index is fully created for the first time.

Millennium · Feb 16, 2005, 05:10 PM

They're talking about indexing. That takes a while the first time, because it has to hit the whole hard drive. After that it's faster.

Thinine · Feb 16, 2005, 09:40 PM

Yeah, initial indexing is a pain. I hope that for those of us who do a clean install of Tiger, there's a prebuilt index of the base install, even if it's customized. It makes sense.

TETENAL · Feb 16, 2005, 09:48 PM

Originally posted by Thinine:
Yeah, initial indexing is a pain. I hope that for those of us who do a clean install of Tiger, there's a prebuilt index of the base install, even if it's customized. It makes sense.

It doesn't. Since applications may install Spotlight plug-ins the actual index depends on the installed applications. And that can vary depending on the install options you click.

The first time indexing isn't a problem anyway since it is a one time thing. Worst case you keep your computer running over night after installing Tiger - so what? What will be interesting to see is what happens when Hinz & Kunz install their Spotlight plug-ins and they are slow as molasses and crash prone. We know it's inevitable that is going to happen eventually. How Spotlight handles such a situation will be interesting to see.

Agent69 · Feb 17, 2005, 07:20 AM

Speaking for me personally, I don't find Spotlight to be a compelling feature. What I want to know is can you turn Spotlight off?

Thinine · Feb 17, 2005, 08:08 AM

I don't know if you can turn it entirely off, but I think you can tell it not to index certain files or drives. I don't know why you'd want it off, unless you're extremely pressed for HD space.

Originally posted by TETENAL:
It doesn't. Since applications may install Spotlight plug-ins the actual index depends on the installed applications. And that can vary depending on the install options you click.

Um, no. What are you talking about? Tiger will come with a preinstalled number of file importers, which will always be installed. Sure, after the initial install, you may have applications with custom importers, but that has nothing to do with the initial install.

Originally posted by TETENAL:
The first time indexing isn't a problem anyway since it is a one time thing. Worst case you keep your computer running over night after installing Tiger - so what? What will be interesting to see is what happens when Hinz & Kunz install their Spotlight plug-ins and they are slow as molasses and crash prone. We know it's inevitable that is going to happen eventually. How Spotlight handles such a situation will be interesting to see.

First time indexing is exactly what they were talking about when they said indexing is slow. The fact that it can take several hours to generate an initial index, even on a base install is something that people are concerned about. I mean, it's going full bore the entire time, so it's not really usable while it's indexing, unless you have a higher end system (dual processor). And aside from the importer being slow and affecting access speeds, the stability of an importer will not affect the stability of the Spotlight system. The importer and the searcher are separate things.

Agent69 · Feb 17, 2005, 08:37 AM

Originally posted by Thinine:
I don't know if you can turn it entirely off, but I think you can tell it not to index certain files or drives. I don't know why you'd want it off, unless you're extremely pressed for HD space.

Because it is useless for me. For you guys, it might be great, but I don't need to search inside my files and I use Gmail for email. So why have something running that I do not need?

xMetal · Feb 17, 2005, 09:05 AM

Originally posted by Agent69:
Because it is useless for me. For you guys, it might be great, but I don't need to search inside my files and I use Gmail for email. So why have something running that I do not need?

Um, mayhaps you should wait to use a final version of it before deeming it "useless".

You may be right, but how can you know that now...

Millennium · Feb 17, 2005, 09:32 AM

Originally posted by Thinine:
Yeah, initial indexing is a pain. I hope that for those of us who do a clean install of Tiger, there's a prebuilt index of the base install, even if it's customized. It makes sense.

A prebuilt index doesn't make a lot of sense, since there is no way to know what's on the hard drive before you install (not all users format when they reinstall). Also, given the huge possible number of custom installations, you'd have to include prebuilt index files for all of them. That could easily take up a DVD of its own.

However, it might not be a bad idea to build an index as part of the installation process. It could be thrown in as part of the long and mysterious "Optimizing System Performance" section of the installation. It looks as though Spotlight indexes on a per-disk basis, so there shouldn't be any technical obstacles to doing this: the system already has to be able to index volumes other than the one used to boot it. That way you get an index customized to your machine before you reboot into Tiger for the first time (actually the second, since the install disk presumably has Tiger on it, but who counts that?)

JLL · Feb 17, 2005, 09:52 AM

Originally posted by Agent69:
Because it is useless for me. For you guys, it might be great, but I don't need to search inside my files and I use Gmail for email. So why have something running that I do not need?

Do you know the names on every document you have?

Maflynn · Feb 17, 2005, 10:02 AM

Originally posted by JLL:
Do you know the names on every document you have?

Yes as I have them logically organized, i.e., using a folder structure that makes sense.

While I think the that spotlight might be benificial at times its not crucial for me.

I can see why some people doen't want it turned on or need this feature. Why incur the overhead for a feature not deemed useful.

One size does not fit all and different features have varying levels of priority/use for people.

Mike

HOMBRESINIESTRO · Feb 17, 2005, 10:15 AM

Originally posted by Agent69:
Because it is useless for me. For you guys, it might be great, but I don't need to search inside my files and I use Gmail for email. So why have something running that I do not need?

I don't know if I do have any use for it, either. I don't have that many files. about 40 or 50 in my Documents folder. Pics are managed by iPhoto and Music by iTunes. So Spotlight will be basically for these 40 files. :-/

p.s. Agent69: Your release history is fine, but you could add perhaps some more versions and get the info you need from here: http://apfelwiki.de/wiki/Main/MacOSX. You can even get the build numbers there when clicking on them links.

cpac · Feb 17, 2005, 10:17 AM

Like Maflynn, I keep everything pretty tightly organized and don't currently have any trouble finding documents when I need them; but that said, I'm very excited about Spotlight.

I like the idea of an instant-search and think it will replace drilling down in the Finder for me a lot of the time, and since I *do* use Mail, and Address Book and iCal, and iPhoto, I'm very excited about being able to search them all from a single location, instantly... (and no, I won't mind letting a clean install take a few hours to index everything the first time through. Since that only needs to happen once, I feel like that's time very well spent.

Agent69 · Feb 17, 2005, 10:59 AM

Originally posted by JLL:
Do you know the names on every document you have?

The regular find command does what I need it to do, and I have only needed it once (to find all files ending with .jpg with my home directory).

But like I said, I don't need it. I am sure that for some of you, this feature will be a godsend.

Agent69 · Feb 17, 2005, 11:04 AM

Originally posted by HOMBRESINIESTRO:
p.s. Agent69: Your release history is fine, but you could add perhaps some more versions and get the info you need from here: http://apfelwiki.de/wiki/Main/MacOSX. You can even get the build numbers there when clicking on them links.

I actually created that list because I have a large collection of screenshots and I can't always remember what version of Mac OS X is being displayed in them. I focused on Mac OS X client because that is what I use.