A few months ago I had to give up using my Mac Mini as my primary personal computer.
I couldn’t put my finger on when, but looking back I realized it had gotten slower and slower to use since the day of purchase, and while I could understand that having two users logged on all the time while running a few services could tax a 3GB system I wasn’t happy with it becoming completely unresponsive for several seconds - sometimes minutes (!) - from what I would consider normal usage.
Some call it beach ball hell - I statement I wholeheartedly agreed with.
Yesterday I stumbled upon the solution, and it was a whole lot cheaper than buying a new and improved model (since the old computer was constantly thrashing the hard drive I figured I needed more memory, something my 2007 model was already maxed out of) or replacing the built in hard drive with an SSD.
While researching something else I saw blog posts where people mentioned having seen Spotlight having a hard time indexing files that undergo frequent change, and that it while doing so seemed to consume an excessive amount of real and virtual memory.
The proposed solution was simple - use the Spotlight Privacy setting to exclude the offending files/folders from indexing. So I did, and my Mac Mini is now as happy as the day I bought it.
There was no problem with dual users and several services functioning well on a 3GB system. The problem was with poorly written indexing software, and I find myself adding more and more parts of my system to the exclude list (external disks - check. app databases - check. logs - check. app preferences - check) and for each addition the virtual and real memory usage of the mds process drops.
Come to think of it, the only thing I ever use Spotlight for is as an easy way to launch applications. I feel an include list instead of an exclude list would be better usability, something Apple is claimed to be good at.
The default behaviour - indexing everything - seems to be the reason why the search phrase mds process returns a long list of experiences similar to mine. Maybe more posts like this can shorten that list.
So far it doesn’t seem Apple has come to the rescue.