Goodbye Spotlight... and good riddance.
2007-04-04 21:18:37
Google has finally released Google Desktop for Mac Yay! Update: if you have a lot of files (more than 200,000; I have an average of about 500,000 on my machines), it's a good idea to disable spotlight after you install google desktop. "mds" which is the spotlight index process, starts to go nuts, eating up all your memory.
It got up to 750MB RSS on one of my machines before I killed it, and up to 450MB on this machine I am working on now. Spotlight is useless in any case if you have a reasonably large number of files, maybe more than 50,000 or so. It's like they tested it for the "average" mac user who has some email and pictures, but not for the nerd programmer who has collected 20 years of email, code and random stuff in their home directory. My hypothesis is that Spotlight is trying to index the Google Desktop index, but that's a wild hunch.
Update: 6 years later. Turned out Google Desktop fucking murdered performance of file I/O on my machine, especially when opening a lot of files. In fact, it created some bad bugs that full source code checkouts (of thousands of little files) would actually crash the source control system.
Spotlight has massively improved since then, and I use it all the time.