Tiger Bits: Possible Spotlight Bug

the one thing that keeps me from reinstalling Tiger from scratch is Classic environment, which i need just for quark 4.

MattB, i'll tell you about the performance. it takes ~5sec to render a text layer in adobe photoshop cs2 on an A4 canvas, 300dpi, after i upgraded to Tiger. i believe this is just wrong - on a powerbook 1,33 with a gig of ram.

Tom, *pauses, scratches head* I thought Spotlight does a lot more than just searching, including allowing you to add your own metadata to flag certain files, and prioritizing commonly chosen search results. That's what everybody kept telling me when I complained that it was the same thing as Quicksilver; I did notice it getting faster and better at anticipating what I wanted. From the Spotlight page: " Spotlight uses a combination of relevance and timeliness to determine which of these items is the most likely one that you are looking for and shows that item as the 'Top Hit'. The top hit is listed before any of the other results and you can open the top hit directly using by pressing typing command-return."

You wrote: "...I lost the last several days of indexing and training Spotlight..." There is no training Spotlight. It doesn't adapt to your habits or whatever. It just indexes.

So what about the performance of Tiger on a clean install versus upgrading? I've had some performance issues on upgrading and am thinking about a clean install, but I would like to hear more users opinions on this.

Ah, so it is a "feature." Would've been nice to know beforehand.

I believe Brock is right. This also makes it so if you share an external drive between two or more macs (running tiger), any time you plug them into either machine the index is up to date, as well as the privacy settings, so no matter what machine the drive is attached to, it will obey your privacy settings.

My initial inclination is that perhaps the settings are stored on a per-drive basis in the Spotlight-V100 folder, which would make sense from a network drive perspective. (You can explicitly tell Spotlight to index network drives, and IIRC the index is stored on the drive. It would make sense for an administrator to be able to restrict folders for everyone searching the network drive without having to touch the privacy settings on every computer.)