How do I reduce my spotlight indexing frequency?

Question

It's really frustrating when my computer slows to a crawl when spotlight starts indexing.  It spends two or three hours every couple of days doing it, can I schedule it to do it at night instead?  I use Safari, which takes about 3/4 of my RAM, so indexing on top of that makes it almost unusable, and it starts indexing while I'm trying to work in the morning.  I don't see any setting to change when it does it.

Answer 1

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
Step 1
Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar.
Enter "mdworker" (without the quotes) in the Filter text field. Select the most recent 50 or so messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V).
If there are long runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don't post many repetitions of the same message.
When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.
Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Some personal information, such as the names of your files, may be included — anonymize before posting.
Step 2
Do the same with the search string "mds".