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UnixMac · Oct 23, 2004, 01:08 AM

When I chose "get info" for my MacintoshHD, under Content Index, there were two buttons (Index now) and (Delete Index)... what exactly do they do??

When I tried to "index" my drive... it seemed to take a very, very, long time and the CPU usage on both CPU's went up between 50-89% and stayed there, and the fans spun up a bit as well.. Sounds like major work? So what's the benefit?

Powaqqatsi · Oct 23, 2004, 03:09 AM

It's indexes all files so they can be searched by content.

UnixMac · Oct 23, 2004, 10:15 AM

Originally posted by Powaqqatsi:
It's indexes all files so they can be searched by content.

makes sense... thanks. Seems to take forever to do though, and I don't have all that many files. So if I don't manually tell it to index, does it ever do it on it's own? if not will the search work right?

Powaqqatsi · Oct 23, 2004, 10:23 AM

It does indeed take ages and AFAIK it doesn't do it on it's own. I think you lose the ability the search to content... But I'm not 100% sure, it COULD be that the system does indeed do this automatically.

UnixMac · Oct 23, 2004, 10:38 AM

Thanks... I actually noticed that on the drive that i indexed over last night, it searches in a snap... things come up as I type for them, while on my other drive it takes forever... so I guess it helps to do it.

mintcake · Feb 5, 2005, 04:28 PM

*bump*

I'm currently indexing my powerbook's 80 gig hard drive. I started about 18 hours ago, and it's still only 10% done! Meantime my pb's running HOT and sluggish.

I don't care about fast searches, I'd like my hard drive to perform a bit better. Am I wasting my times with this indexing lark?

UnixMac · Feb 5, 2005, 09:59 PM

Originally posted by mintcake:
*bump*

I'm currently indexing my powerbook's 80 gig hard drive. I started about 18 hours ago, and it's still only 10% done! Meantime my pb's running HOT and sluggish.

I don't care about fast searches, I'd like my hard drive to perform a bit better. Am I wasting my times with this indexing lark?

Wow! Doesn't sound right at all... how full is it?

mintcake · Feb 5, 2005, 11:09 PM

Very.

I'm usually hovering somewhere between 2 and 6 gigs free. I keep trying to delete stuff, but... it just keeps filling up again.

utidjian · Feb 5, 2005, 11:21 PM

Originally posted by mintcake:

I'm currently indexing my powerbook's 80 gig hard drive. I started about 18 hours ago, and it's still only 10% done! Meantime my pb's running HOT and sluggish.

I don't care about fast searches, I'd like my hard drive to perform a bit better. Am I wasting my times with this indexing lark?

Well I just started mine a few minutes ago on a iMac 17" FP G4 with 1G RAM and 80G disk. Only using 14.5G of it so far... it lists 442,601 files to be indexed... hasn't done 1% of them yet.

Quite naturally it is going to take a long time and load down the machine.

It would make sense if the drive came pre-indexed with the factory install and would just update the database each night (or something) similar to how updatedb does for the CLI util 'locate'. Of course that only indexes filenames, not contents.

Having full text indexing is damn handy thing though. This is what Spotlight in Tiger is supposed to bring to Mac OS X. Presumably it will be an order of magnitude more efficient.

Full text indexing of an entire volume is not ever going to be particularly easy. It will make sense to have it just update once the initial indexing is done... add new files and delete references to removed files. A friend wrote a full text indexer for me a while back... I still use it. He wrote it in Perl, PHP, and MySQL. For the initial indexing of a volume it could take hours, even days. We tested it up to about 10 million documents of all types. But once indexed searches took less than a second. He even added some fun stuff like 'soundex'. If one forgets how a keyword is spelled it is enough to remember what it sorta sounded like. Of course soundex based searches would take longer. All things considered it is a damn handy app and I still use it daily. It never bothers me because, as documents are added, it updates the index at 4AM automatically. I rarely add more than a few thousand documents at a time and I don't notice if it takes a few minutes or a few hours to index them.

Hal Itosis · Feb 5, 2005, 11:34 PM

Originally posted by mintcake:
I'm currently indexing my powerbook's 80 gig hard drive. I started about 18 hours ago, and it's still only 10% done! Meantime my pb's running HOT and sluggish. I don't care about fast searches, I'd like my hard drive to perform a bit better. Am I wasting my times with this indexing lark?

Indexing is ONLY useful if one is searching for **content** within a file.
Meaning, you want to find every document with a specific string INSIDE
the file (i.e., not in the file's name).

Indexing uses up TONS of disk space. If content searches are especially
important, then perhaps all the extra space (and time) devoted to creating
(and maintaining) these index files is worthwhile. Otherwise it's not.

Though not as fast as indexed drives, searching by content can be quickly
done using apps designed for that purpose. (They are slower, but usually
have a better GUI... plus other nice options for managing the results info).

Check out both: EasyFind and SpeedSearch.

mintcake · Feb 6, 2005, 12:02 AM

OK thanks Hal, that's exactly what I wanted to know.

/deletes index

bergy · Feb 6, 2005, 04:49 PM

Hello All ...

IN a couple of months we can all use Spotlight and our indexing worries are over ..

I hope .. think ...??

UnixMac · Feb 6, 2005, 05:18 PM

Originally posted by bergy:
Hello All ...

IN a couple of months we can all use Spotlight and our indexing worries are over ..

I hope .. think ...??

How does QuickSilver factor into all of this, how is it any different that either the OS X indexing and search or for that matter OS X.4's spotlight?

EnVoy · Feb 7, 2005, 07:44 PM

So how does one delete the index and get back the space? (using Jaguar)

utidjian · Feb 7, 2005, 08:26 PM

Originally posted by EnVoy:
So how does one delete the index and get back the space? (using Jaguar)

Click on Macintosh HD (or whatever you are calling it) then,
File --> Get info --> Content index

If there is an existing index file of the drive the 'Delete Index' button will not be greyed out. If the button is not greyed out, click on it.

Command-I will also bring up the disk info window.

alphasubzero949 · Feb 7, 2005, 10:39 PM

The cheap and easy fix:

1. Search your home directory for anything with FBC (Visible and invisible).
2. Your search result should come back with a lot of .FBCIndex, .FBCLockFolder, and .FBCSemaphoreFile entries.
3. Open the terminal and type sudo_rm_-rf_ (NOTE that the underscores represent SPACES).
4. Highlight and drag all highlighted items described in #2 into the Terminal window.
5. Hit return. Enter your admin password and hit return.