If you wondered why your Mac always is slow, air fans running amok and noticed those mdworker and ATSServer threads in the activity display using half of the memory and cpu power of a 4GB machine, you might want to check if you got stuff that spotlight indexes but shouldn’t. Here two problems that I ran into:

- Colluquy, the irc client already has its own problem with 100% cpu usage but if you don’t exclude the log folder from spotlight search by adding it to your “private files” it might eat 50-100% of the cpu usage time non stop.

- PDF-files are automatically getting indexed by spotlight, just that it takes *forever* and that it seems the same pdfs get indexed over and over, no matter if they changed or not. Your best bet is to put all your systems PDF-files into a special folder and exclude that folder from spotlight by adding it as private.

If you can avoid using spotlight you might want to disable it completely. You can’t configure it to behave and it will keep slowing your system at the worst times. And Apple doesn’t allow you to do anything about it. Annoying.