Tiger frustrations

I recently upgraded to the newest version of Mac OS X: 10.4, a.k.a. “Tiger.” Aside from the complaints I listed before about rsync, I’ve had a lot of problems with Spotlight.

Even after leaving my computer on all night for Spotlight to index my drives, I find that the mds and mdimport processes will randomly launch and take up all of my CPU. This occurs even if I haven’t mounted any disks or even done a Spotlight search recently. I also often find LAServer eating whatever CPU mds and mdimport will leave it.

While this is happening, my system slows to a crawl, and Spotlight refuses to give any results for anything, even files that I know exist. While Spotlight is thinking, the menubar and Dock are completely unresponsive. Also seemingly related is the phenomenon where Open File dialog boxes will freeze for over a minute when selecting an item. And often nothing happens when I try to add an item to the “do not index” list in the Spotlight prefpane.

I’ve also found many other minor bugs, like misbehavior when minimizing movies in QuickTime, but this Spotlight stuff is killing me. My computer randomly becomes unusable for hours at a time. Apple, hurry up with 10.4.1!

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