> Disable spotlight for everything except what you want to use it for
My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot though.
It's really abysmal. I had a similar situation: every time I'd pull a monorepo, my machine would be flooded with "mdworker" processes. The CPU would spin up and the machine would operate at 85c for a few hours before finally cooling down. The culprit was Spotlight, and the solution was to disable search indexing.
Spotlight is a really good search tool, and it's worth occasionally letting it build its index. You mostly only notice this when you've changes a whole bunch of files or setup the computer for the first time. It really is short-term pain for long-term gain, because Spotlight is phenomenal at finding anything on the Mac in a really short amount of time.
That being said, if you're in the dev-space, I'd recommend using Raycast instead. I've dong some cool things with it, like format my commit messages, generate UUIDs, and search my bookmarks with a command (/w dev -> my company's development application with a really long URL).
I loved Spotlight until I had to check out several project to my computer. Now with thousands of non-own files it’s really hard to find what I want. Even if I look for my own projects, Spotlight shows the same project as it appears in several node_modules as a dependency. Find out the right one means I have to hold alt on each item. Ludicrous.
It's not worth it if my computer heats up to 85 degrees for an hour and a half every few days. Really throws a wrench in my productivity and has already made me miss a couple meetings. Raycast looks neat, but I'm not interested in adding Yet Another Random Closed-Source Tool to my Mac. At this point I'm mostly using it as a dumb terminal and even that is testing my limits with how annoying Homebrew and the FreeBSD 4.1-ass kernel is.
More like "my computer's CPU is pinned so high that I can't do the screenshare I promised you earlier, because I made the mistake of trying to rebase 15 minutes before I was scheduled to appear"
My friend's mac would "take off" (fan spun up crazy fast) after every boot/login and I disabled full-text search of documents to fix it. There was probably a weird, maybe not-to-spec pdf/docx on the filesystem that spotlight couldn't parse and got stuck. Kinda dumb that it would waste a 100% usage on one CPU core for a couple minutes every boot though.