MacBook Pro becomes has spotlight problems when disk space gets low

I've noticed that when my disk space gets very low, that mds starts running all of the time bringing my laptops's performance to a crawl. I've also noticed that oddly, when I try to use spotlight for a full text search (not just from/to/subject searches) in Mail, that spotlight seems to start re-indexing immediately.
Specifically:
1) I go to mail and start a search in spotligh
2) the "message body" option is available for me to search through the entire message body
3) I select "message body" for my search, but spotlight finds no results (even though there are some)
4) the next search I do in Mail via spotlight now shows "message body" as greyed out
5) mds and associated processes suddenly start running and my mac becomes very slow
6) after some number of hours, mds stops and "message body" becomes available in Mail again for searches, but as soon as I try to use it this process repeats
I had about 10 gigs free on my disk, but after freeing up about 30 gigs this all stopped and spotlight started working again fine.

This emphasises the old guideline of having not more than about 80% of disk space used for best performance on any computer. If in doubt about which hdd to buy get the largest you can afford - probably the next size up from that!
Neville

Similar Messages

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    Hello,<o:p></o:p>
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    Also, the following post discusses the topic regarding Windows Server 2008:
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    I was wondering if there was any change regarding this in
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    Many thanks.<o:p></o:p>
    Keith<o:p></o:p>
    R K Howard

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    See below examples on some example scripts that you could use.
    https://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/powershell/disk-space-monitoring-and-early-warning-with-powershell/
    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff730927.aspx
    http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/6e935887-6b30-4654-b977-6f5d289f3a63Hope
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    //Johan
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    Blog: http://365lab.net

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    Hi,
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    Please help I am going out my mind with this thing :(
    Thanks x jade

    This can be used to boot the machine and delelte enough files to get it to boot normally.
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