My Mac has been slow for days and the fan is loud ('Spotlight is indexing')
After a big update or migration Spotlight reindexes everything. That should take 1-2 hours, not days. Days = stuck index.
Try this first
- 1Click the magnifier top right. Does it say 'Indexing: X hours remaining'? Then it is moving. Give it up to four hours.
- 2Not progressing? System Settings > Siri & Spotlight > bottom 'Privacy'. Add your whole hard drive, then remove it again. That triggers a clean index restart.
- 3Exclude external drives from Spotlight if they do not need to be searched (photos, archive). Add them to the same Privacy list.
- 4No change: Activity Monitor > look for 'mds' and 'mdworker'. Quit them; they restart automatically, often with a clean slate.
When to bring us in
On business Macs under MDM we can set Spotlight config consistently so this does not keep coming back after updates.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
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