How long does Spotlight reindexing take? I think my Mac mini has finished that process. But my iPhone 15 Pro Max keeps saying that process is still going. (I installed the developer betas Monday evening.)
That would depend on a couple of things - processor speed, i/o speed of the drives youâre indexing, and the amount of data on each drive. So the range of results will be fairly different for different users on different Macs.
Also, I find determining exactly when the Spotlight indexing ends to be difficult. I seem to remember a way in Mojave that you could get a progress bar to display; but so far, I havenât found anything like that in Sequoia.
The way I try and determine this is to run Activity Monitor, select the Disk tab, sort the results by % CPU, and periodically check it to see if dozens of mdworker processes (which are doing the actual Spotlight indexing) are eating up CPU cycles. When they stop showing up at the top of the process list, I assume itâs finished. Iâd be delighted to know of a better way!
I can give you two very subjective (and inexact) data points: I have about 2 - 2.5 TB of data (lots of photo archives, music and videos; also a large archive of Word and PDF documents) on various SSD drives (most of them partitions on my internal Apple SSD). Due to problems with Spotlight Indexing, I usually delete the Spotlight indexes and then rebuild them every 2 months (sooner if problems show up â which they have been under Sequoia).
- 2017 27â i7 Intel iMac, running Mojave: Generally, I had to run it overnight â it took at least 5-6 hours.
- M4 Mac Studio, running Sequoia: Iâve only done this 2 or 3 times so far, but it seems to be finished within 1.5 - 2 hours â maybe less.
I also tend to leave the Mac alone why itâs doing the Spotlight indexing. This is mostly superstition, based on observing Activity Monitor while the indexing is going on. On the i7 iMac, if I started to do work during the indexing, it seemed to me that the mdworker processes would suspend themselves â i.e., stop (or throttle back on) CPU usage.
If I stopped actively working/running apps, it appeared to me the mdworker processes would unsuspend and start indexing again.
I have no idea if thatâs actually whatâs going on; I rationalized that, to keep all the Spotlight indexing from slowing work down, Apple had set the indexing processes at a lower priority than normal apps. Anyone with a better understanding of how Spotlight Indexing currently works (which would be anyone), please speak up â Iâd love to know.
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Note also that since weâre talking about the iOS 27 developer beta, itâs worth noting that Apple said (at the WWDC keynote) that they are making major changes to Spotlight in order to support a lot of the new features. This probably means a complete rebuild of every index, not just an incremental update for those files that changed. And the new indexes are going to contain more/new information that wasnât in older versions of iOS.
In other words, I think it is fair to assume that this indexing will take a lot longer than the indexing done on previous iOS releases. Traditionally, this may take 2-3 days (which most people notice as reduced battery life for a few days after an update). It may take longer with this beta.
We can probably also expect those indexes to consume more storage space - which youâll just see as part of the ambiguous âsystem dataâ category on storage reports.
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I got a notice in Mail on my iPad that it could take up to a week.
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While Iâm not a developer, I would generally suspect like others above have said, it could take a long time depending on several factors, like how much has to be indexed etc. It might even stall on tin hat devices like mine which are not on wifi, signed out of Apple Account and have lots of features turned off.
Does anyone who is observing this new Spotlight as a developer or at that level of knowledge, involved in WWDC specialty sessions etc know if this new indexing will be able to be blocked when installing 27?
Upon further blog reading, I have found what sound to me like improvements in â27 but I donât want this extensive foraging into my data to enable all this automated stuff thatâs coming. My situation is complicated by using one Apple ID originating in the US and one in the EU and living in the EU.
For example, is there a step in the installation process where it can be opted-out or deferred?
I donât mean to derail the Topic so if so please consider a DM instead.
insightful comments, all â thanks!
I have been following mdworker using Activity Monitor. What I observe fits with what you more knowledgeable are telling me.
My iPhone 15 Pro Max is still telling me that âIndexing is in Progressâ since Monday evening. (I note the trumpian capitalization âŚ)
My Mac Mini M4 24 gigs is still whirring away as well.
So Iâll keep watching this discussion, and keep updating my observations. Thanks again!
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So, whatâs a âtin hat device â?
@schwartz I just made the term up, poking fun at self a bit, because I am often ânot holding it rightâ and doing things Apple expects of users of its devices, such as:
oh, and using VPN also. My computing life stems from the days of devices bein self-standing and users controlling them and their contents locally. I like that model and dislike what has become of the state of things.
Like Spotlight mandatorily reaching into personal spaces so deeply to create (apparently also mandatory in os27) a computing experience I donât want. Which has nothing to do with the OP (apologies to @laddie ) , so Iâll say no moreâŚ
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Iâm afraid Spotlight and itâs predecessor Sherlock have been thoroughly foraging through all of your data since 1998.
You can go into System Settings/Spotlight and turn off its access to data from individual applications (Contacts, etc.), document types (all images, etc.) or even entire discs with one exception: your boot drive. Theoretically, you can turn off Spotlight indexing of your boot drive but that is a really bad idea because there are innumerable Spotlight API calls that are used both by the OS as well as applications.
If you are determined to protect some of your data from Spotlight discovery, you could move it to an external drive and disable spotlight indexing for that drive.
In Tahoe, at least, there are very fine-grained controls for spotlight indexing. You might want to spend some time there.
They are promising a much improved spotlight search in Golden Gate and I, for one, am looking forward to that. Too many times, for years now, Spotlight searches have failed to find obvious things for me and many other people.
Dave
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Thanks @Dafuki for the very good ideas and comments!
I used Sherlock and Spotlight for a long time, and found them useful as I am not 100% fastidious in digital filing and afaik the index was kept local. After a while I found Spotlight was less and less successful and more and more invasive and including things like web results at the top of the list, without any way to turn that off. Iâve gradually migrated to LaunchBar, which does exactly what I tell it to do.
In Tahoe I noted the new design and âfeaturesâ and Settings options and turned them all off, even turned off the keyboard shortcut for it. I put my boot drive, yes, in the list of âprivacyâ options and the only downside I noticed is searching in a Finder window and saved searches donât work anymore, but that for me is a really minor issue. Otherwise I have not missed it or noticed odd behavior in other apps and am glad to have retained what feels like a bit of control.
Yes I too would like a new and better Spotlight, IF it could be customised for just finding files and kept locally but so far that doesnât sound likely. It appears itâs being used to facilitate mandatory âAIâ âhelpâ, which I want nothing to do with.
Still, back to the OP, I wouldnât even mind if, when installing, a little notice came up indicating that reindexing could take a long time, and how to know when itâs done, so users know when to expect it to perform as advertised. That would be the courteous thing to do.
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That notice does in a sense happen for me, both in iOS and in MacOS. My initial posting was asking how long that process would take because that was not mentioned.
On Jun 11, 2026, at 1:46 PM, David <tidbits-talk@tidbits.com> wrote:
Still, back to the OP, I wouldnât even mind if, when installing, a little notice came up indicating that reindexing could take a long time, and how to know when itâs done, so users know when to expect it to perform as advertised. That would be the courteous thing to do.
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Not theoretical at all. Apple provides simple commands to disable Spotlight and to erase the index.
I have kept Spotlight disabled for years through many versions of macOS. It rarely does anything useful for me â searching using EasyFind works so much better. Also, the mdworkers were writing way too many GB of data on my SSD â another reason to disable it.
Nothing bad has happened to any of my Macs.
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EasyFind is great but what a peculiar choice. Why not just let it do its thing? When you disable it youâre not only disabling file search but search in Mail and other applications that use the Spotlight API. Thereâs a reason you get the caution message when you disable Spotlight on the boot drive.
Yes, they do write a lot but at the moment on my machine there is only one mdworker running and it isnât doing anything. Just after a system upgrade, yes, theyâre like a swarm of bees but they do simmer down eventually. Itâs your choice to do what you want with your machine but in this case I think the disk overhead to keeping Spotlight active is minimal, certainly less than watching a movie a night. 
It will be interesting to see what Golden Gate Spotlight will do. I just took a look at the developer docs and thereâs a whole bunch there that wasnât there before.
Oh, and for those whoâve jumped on the developer beta train and are concerned about long indexing remember the developer betas usually leave in instrumentation and the like that will slow things down.
Dave
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@Dafuki you clearly know much more about this than I do! But I did notice:
Search in Mail is working fine. Maybe I havenât excluded the boot drive? Under Search Privacy⌠in Spotlight Settings, Iâve included the highest level âMacintosh HDâ.
In the main Spotlight Settings window, there are 5 gray background blobs of settings, the 2nd and 5th just show animated spinner symbols.
Ah well, as noted afaik Iâm not missing out on much by having Spotlight effectively disabled, and I wasnât using it even when it was âonâ.
Which makes me wonder if my current settings would be honored in the event I did move to â27.
If itâs been working for you this long you might as well keep going. 
Maybe. . . 
Dave
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David Blanchard wrote:
âI have kept Spotlight disabled for years through many versions of macOS. It rarely does anything useful for me â searching using EasyFind works so much better. Also, the mdworkers were writing way too many GB of data on my SSD â another reason to disable it.
Nothing bad has happened to any of my Macs.â
Same here.
I turned off Spotlight when it was first introduced (is that around 20 years ago now?), and never enabled it again.
For searching, Iâll use either EasyFind or Find Any File.
Works for me.
Will never âturn backâ.
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