spotlight

For too long, my Mac Mini was sluggish. It’s a 2012 model decked out with 16 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 processor. But when my 2007 iMac running the bleeding edge Mac OS X 10.11 was snappier than my Mini, I had to dig deeper to see what was going on.

I always felt BackBlaze was involved with the slowdown but hey, offsite backups are worth a speed penalty right? But it never really made sense. Even with online backups complete, things were still slow as BackBlaze sat idle. Looking at the activity monitor, all the RAM was consumed and sometimes, the bztransmit process would utilize 100% of the CPU.

Finally, a Google search lead me to the answer. BackBlaze and Mac OS X’s Spotlight were essentially nagging each other to no end, making my Mac Mini crawl along. As backups occurred, BackBlaze would log the changes, and that would then trigger a resource-intensive Spotlight index process. As more files were backed up (and logged), the Spotlight index would launch again and again and again, overwhelming the Mini’s resources.

So the answer (that wasn’t already configured in my BackBlaze setup)? Exclude BackBlaze from Spotlight. That’s it. Immediately after making the Spotlight exclusion, my Mini came to life, much faster than ever before. What a loser! I should have researched this previously instead of waiting all this time.

Here’s a few more Spotlight exclusions that may help out even more.