With nobody at Apple handling the engineering problem of implementing user requests, we're stuck with what we got. So I highly recommend App Tamer by St. Clair Software (no affiliation), which lets you set how much CPU percentage each process can use:
It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm using an old version of macOS and don't know if that's mdutil now or if Apple has outsmarted its throttling. I also set web browsers to 10% when they're in the background. And you can always message the developer with feature requests.
A bit of a rant: I honestly feel that we've done process scheduling wrong in most OSs and apps. It should have always been up to the user, along with granting permissions as needed. And I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds for example, so that we can have as many tabs open as we want. Instead we've let the technology order us what to do. It's all just so wrong. But the barriers to entry for writing a new browser are so high that only large organizations can do it, and they choose not to, so help isn't coming. Although I think with the arrival of AI, we're going to start seeing real software again that makes a mockery of the status quo and hopefully eats its lunch.
I ran into this yesterday. My entire machine was running slow. I checked Activity Monitor and it was mediaanalysisd running at 100% for about an hour. i couldn't kill it as it would just restart. A search said I was S.O.L. unless I disabled SIP. (can't, it's a work laptop)
Further, Spotlight is completely broken in Tahoe. I have all categories off in System Preferences except Apps because it's the only thing I use or want to use spotlight for, a quick way to launch apps. But as of Tahoe 26.2 or so Spotlight is showing tons of non-app results so it's no longer useful as an app launcher.
It's a shame Apple has decided that if the launch agent or daemon lives in the System folder that means the user/admin should have zero control over it. I should be able to disable any launchd job on my computer end of story.
You’re very entitled to your opinion, but it should be fairly obvious why this isn’t reasonable from their perspective. Put another way, let’s just say I think apple is glad you’re not making decisions about how their operating system should work. It’s an OS built for users, not those who wish to have iron control over everything. Allowing that would be disastrous for most users just to appease the very small percentage who’d want that.
What sucks is that you can't disable SIP without _also_ disabling disk encryption ("FileVault"), because Apple changed from full disk encryption to only encrypting user data, and relying on SIP and crypto hashes to protect the system partition. Therefore, you can't "safely" disable SIP, as you'd be able to boot into recovery mode and perform an evil maid attack.
This is really irritating, both that:
- I can't "accept the risk" and force disk encryption anyway. This may be technically possible if you bludgeon the OS enough, but it's definitely not something the built in CLI tooling supports.
- I can't use the old full disk encryption mode. Presumably, this code does or did still exist somewhere, but isn't supported because it's not used in any supported configuration.
So you're left with the option of having no disk encryption on your laptop, or having SIP.
EDIT: I'm thinking of SSV, not SIP per se. But when it comes to disabling the built-in launchd services like Spotlight, you have to disable SSV to do so, and that requires disabling FileVault.
I know the writing has been on the wall for a while but as a former fanboy, I just didn't see it. When SIP was released, it was my first "ah ha" wake-up call that Apple is no longer building software for me. Ten years later, it's still getting worse. This idea that the owner of the computer is not the ultimate authority over what is running on that computer is slowly seeping its way into macOS and with every release it seems to get worse. That and the ecosystem of apps that abandon you if you're running N minus 3 or earlier macOS.
I'm finally starting to de-Applify my home computing and slowly removing my and my family's dependence on the Apple ecosystem. Replacing an old Mac Mini here, replacing an old MacBook there. It's been a long time coming, but I'm out.
I'm not even mentioning Tahoe which is a disaster but doesn't bother me because I don't have a single machine that can run anything past Ventura anyway.
I understand your point of view. I think that Apple are simply too impassive to include a System Integrity Protection which allows for fine-grained i.e. per-file changes in system directories. macOS could do with something like SELinux, but that's not a paper bag you can vibe code your way out of.
You appear to be confusing System Integrity Protection with the Signed System Volume. FileVault works fine with SIP disabled. But you can't disable SSV without disabling FileVault.
Yes, this is true! I was thinking about "disabling SIP" in the sense of being able to modify the system to e.g. disable the Spotlight launchd service. My mistake.
But still -- you can't "unlock" the system (in this sense) without disabling SSV, which requires disabling FileVault.
(Unless I'm wrong about that too, and there is a way to disable Spotlight without disabling SSV)
As hinted with the Finder comment, "Spotlight" is behind much more than the command-space search box. I don't know what the Siri services might do other than Siri itself, but wouldn't shock me if they were involved in things like Shortcuts and Control Center widgets. I understand thinking things you don't use are simply a "waste of CPU and storage space", but this reads like the kind of posts I used to see in the Windows XP era where people would open Task Manager and kill random processes they didn't understand. Best to make a little more effort to understand what the OS is doing before taking a scalpel to it. Or if you'd rather not, there's always OpenBSD (being serious here, it's pretty cool).
Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.
I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.
I’m not a turn spotlight off guy but it is a bit of a pig in terms of apple’s approaches to system crawling and indexing and how it leaves its metadata detritus all over the disk. I can see the desire to disable it for some.
I was hopeful that they'd finally give us something to make Alfred unnecessary but it's still slow as shit, so I'm still using Alfred.
I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.
But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive."
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
That might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
Challenge with trying to use Raycast more broadly in lieu of Spotlight for systemwide search is Raycast appears to be built on top of the spotlight indexes (mds mdworker)
Went down this rabbit hole a few months ago seeing whether it was at all possible to disable the automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS.
Wasn't able to figure out how to do so but this blog was absolutely the best resource for digging one layer deeper on all things Spotlight-related, highly recommend.
I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.
Supposedly there is no data shared with Google when using Gemini-powered Siri:
Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure.[1]
Honestly I have no idea if they have the best answer, but I thoroughly respect a blog post like this that is so concise/wastes no time. Here is the issue, here is what we want to do, here is what it won’t do, ultimately this is the best solution we have come up with + clear instructions.
The Eclectic Light has been the best Mac technology blog for years, often serving as the only source of knowledge for how some of the more obscure system components work.
A small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning.
In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.
Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.
So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?
Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.
Yeah, I used to have a hot corner set up so that I could fling my mouse towards the upper left and then type the first letter or two of the app name, just like in Gnome.
Now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second (possibly my fault - I have 'reduce animations' switched on, but it seems to freeze the screen for the duration of the animation that would previously have played), and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds, and then it might finally respond to my keyboard input... but even then, it fails to find the app maybe 20% of the time. This is on a ~1yo M4 Macbook Pro w/ 36 GB RAM.
So for the past month I've been training myself to alt+tab round to the finder window and navigate to the apps folder from there.
I've never been much of a Macos fan, but this is shockingly poor - less of a papercut, more a wedge of smouldering bamboo shoved under my fingernails.
On the other side of the fence, I enjoy the new Spotlight-for-Applications that opens when I hit the touch bar key (I still have an M1) for the old Launchpad. It seems to sort programs by frequency, so it knows that I open Ghostty far more often than Ghostery, and typing "Gh" will bring me to Ghostty instead of Ghostery. In the old Launchpad, applications were always presented alphabetically when you began typing, so Ghostery always was selected instead of Ghostty. I had to type "gh" right key enter before, but now just I just hit "gh" enter.
With nobody at Apple handling the engineering problem of implementing user requests, we're stuck with what we got. So I highly recommend App Tamer by St. Clair Software (no affiliation), which lets you set how much CPU percentage each process can use:
https://stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/index.html
It does cost $14.95 USD, but it's given me my computer back for years now. I have Spotlight Indexer set to 10%, although I'm using an old version of macOS and don't know if that's mdutil now or if Apple has outsmarted its throttling. I also set web browsers to 10% when they're in the background. And you can always message the developer with feature requests.
A bit of a rant: I honestly feel that we've done process scheduling wrong in most OSs and apps. It should have always been up to the user, along with granting permissions as needed. And I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds for example, so that we can have as many tabs open as we want. Instead we've let the technology order us what to do. It's all just so wrong. But the barriers to entry for writing a new browser are so high that only large organizations can do it, and they choose not to, so help isn't coming. Although I think with the arrival of AI, we're going to start seeing real software again that makes a mockery of the status quo and hopefully eats its lunch.
> I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds for example
Chrome added a feature called "Memory Saver" that suspends tabs in the background. I believe other browsers have similar features.
I can't believe that no web browser has implemented turning JavaScript off after perhaps 10 seconds
Disabling and then re-enabling Javascript will cause my bank's web site to log you out, requiring full 2FA to log in again.
I ran into this yesterday. My entire machine was running slow. I checked Activity Monitor and it was mediaanalysisd running at 100% for about an hour. i couldn't kill it as it would just restart. A search said I was S.O.L. unless I disabled SIP. (can't, it's a work laptop)
Further, Spotlight is completely broken in Tahoe. I have all categories off in System Preferences except Apps because it's the only thing I use or want to use spotlight for, a quick way to launch apps. But as of Tahoe 26.2 or so Spotlight is showing tons of non-app results so it's no longer useful as an app launcher.
> mediaanalysisd
Incredibly, the current mitigation is a cronjob to SIGSTOP it once per minute. https://github.com/jac-jim/stop-mediaanalysisd
Yearslong history of this issue, with it getting harder and harder. https://gist.github.com/huksley/564be2c903312bcee7dffe415d12...
I have the same problem. It wants to launch iPhone apps instead of the Mac apps. Super frustrating.
It's a shame Apple has decided that if the launch agent or daemon lives in the System folder that means the user/admin should have zero control over it. I should be able to disable any launchd job on my computer end of story.
You’re very entitled to your opinion, but it should be fairly obvious why this isn’t reasonable from their perspective. Put another way, let’s just say I think apple is glad you’re not making decisions about how their operating system should work. It’s an OS built for users, not those who wish to have iron control over everything. Allowing that would be disastrous for most users just to appease the very small percentage who’d want that.
You had full root for more than a decade on any macOS machine.
How is allowing the user the power to disable software on the device they own "disastrous" for anyone
In general or in this case?
I'm also curious about this specific case.
In general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XaJdDqQA0
If that were possible, malware would shut down a mountain of services very quickly.
Right off the bat, XProtect, MRT, Gatekeeper, amfid, system updates, telemetry, MDM...
Disable SIP
What sucks is that you can't disable SIP without _also_ disabling disk encryption ("FileVault"), because Apple changed from full disk encryption to only encrypting user data, and relying on SIP and crypto hashes to protect the system partition. Therefore, you can't "safely" disable SIP, as you'd be able to boot into recovery mode and perform an evil maid attack.
This is really irritating, both that:
- I can't "accept the risk" and force disk encryption anyway. This may be technically possible if you bludgeon the OS enough, but it's definitely not something the built in CLI tooling supports.
- I can't use the old full disk encryption mode. Presumably, this code does or did still exist somewhere, but isn't supported because it's not used in any supported configuration.
So you're left with the option of having no disk encryption on your laptop, or having SIP.
EDIT: I'm thinking of SSV, not SIP per se. But when it comes to disabling the built-in launchd services like Spotlight, you have to disable SSV to do so, and that requires disabling FileVault.
I know the writing has been on the wall for a while but as a former fanboy, I just didn't see it. When SIP was released, it was my first "ah ha" wake-up call that Apple is no longer building software for me. Ten years later, it's still getting worse. This idea that the owner of the computer is not the ultimate authority over what is running on that computer is slowly seeping its way into macOS and with every release it seems to get worse. That and the ecosystem of apps that abandon you if you're running N minus 3 or earlier macOS.
I'm finally starting to de-Applify my home computing and slowly removing my and my family's dependence on the Apple ecosystem. Replacing an old Mac Mini here, replacing an old MacBook there. It's been a long time coming, but I'm out.
I'm not even mentioning Tahoe which is a disaster but doesn't bother me because I don't have a single machine that can run anything past Ventura anyway.
I understand your point of view. I think that Apple are simply too impassive to include a System Integrity Protection which allows for fine-grained i.e. per-file changes in system directories. macOS could do with something like SELinux, but that's not a paper bag you can vibe code your way out of.
You appear to be confusing System Integrity Protection with the Signed System Volume. FileVault works fine with SIP disabled. But you can't disable SSV without disabling FileVault.
Yes, this is true! I was thinking about "disabling SIP" in the sense of being able to modify the system to e.g. disable the Spotlight launchd service. My mistake.
But still -- you can't "unlock" the system (in this sense) without disabling SSV, which requires disabling FileVault.
(Unless I'm wrong about that too, and there is a way to disable Spotlight without disabling SSV)
You don't need to modify the system volume. Once SIP is disabled, you can then use standard launchctl commands to disable system launchd jobs.
Apple Configurator MDM profiles can control Siri behavior, e.g.
https://github.com/jankais3r/Siri-NoLoggingPLS
You can disable Siri (and Apple Intelligence) entirely via Apple Configurator or asking the nearest LLM for .mobileconfig file with:As hinted with the Finder comment, "Spotlight" is behind much more than the command-space search box. I don't know what the Siri services might do other than Siri itself, but wouldn't shock me if they were involved in things like Shortcuts and Control Center widgets. I understand thinking things you don't use are simply a "waste of CPU and storage space", but this reads like the kind of posts I used to see in the Windows XP era where people would open Task Manager and kill random processes they didn't understand. Best to make a little more effort to understand what the OS is doing before taking a scalpel to it. Or if you'd rather not, there's always OpenBSD (being serious here, it's pretty cool).
Howard Oakley has made more effort to understand what macOS is doing (and blog about it) than practically anyone else ever.
I understand the desire to disable Siri system-wide, but Spotlight? How else are you going to find your files?
I'm often annoyed how slow/unreliable Spotlight is, especially in Mail, but what's the alternative here?
Store your files in a file structure that makes sense so you know where things are? I have never used Spotlight to find a file because I put files in sensible places.
I use Spotlight all the time to search for the contents of files. I don't memorize the contents and names of every file on my system, that's what my computer is for.
Id disable half - if not more - of default services. Thats why my next laptop will be linux.
Apple is not there yet, but kind of drifting towards becoming the new windows.
Windows at least lets you disable any service you want.
I’m not a turn spotlight off guy but it is a bit of a pig in terms of apple’s approaches to system crawling and indexing and how it leaves its metadata detritus all over the disk. I can see the desire to disable it for some.
Personally I store a list of my files, with tags, in a sqlite database. Granted, I have a lot of custom tooling to make that practical..
Spotlight is much improved in Tahoe - faster and with better results.
I was hopeful that they'd finally give us something to make Alfred unnecessary but it's still slow as shit, so I'm still using Alfred.
I essentially use it as an app switcher. Sometimes I'm jumping between 6 different apps across multiple monitors and multiple workspaces on each and it's faster do type the first couple letters of the app I want and hit return than to Cmd+Tab, parse the icons in their unpredictable order (made harder by all icons being squircles now), and tab to which one I want.
But native spotlight is too slow and unpredictable.
Many people are experiencing the opposite.
Alfred/Raycast
Both are built on top of the Spotlight index.
macOS is POSIX compatible, so find(1) ?
Or `locate`, or mostly remembering where files live?
> Never in the past decade have I thought to myself, "gawrsh, I wonder where this file is on my laptop hard drive."
I do, but 80% of the time I'm able to locate it by opening the directory where I would put it. And 10% it's in the "other" directory. And since I have the shell history, in the remaining case it is still a simple search.
Why would you want to disable an index in favor of an O(N) search?
That might be true in theory, but in practice a find oneliner is still the fastest way to find things. It shouldn't be the case, but a fulltext search is faster than using the OS index, because the former is stable and improved for decades by low level developers, while the later is continuously recreated by people who like Javascript in the UI libraries of the OS.
I use Quicksilver and I have Spotlight disabled.
Raycast is lovely for opening up applications, at least.
Challenge with trying to use Raycast more broadly in lieu of Spotlight for systemwide search is Raycast appears to be built on top of the spotlight indexes (mds mdworker)
Oh, I thought they had their own index. My bad.
Doesn't Raycast (and all the other popular alternatives) build on top of the Spotlight system?
Went down this rabbit hole a few months ago seeing whether it was at all possible to disable the automatic OCR / processing of all image files on macOS.
Wasn't able to figure out how to do so but this blog was absolutely the best resource for digging one layer deeper on all things Spotlight-related, highly recommend.
Haven't tested this, but try:
System Settings > General > Language & Region > Live Text
"Select text in images to copy or take action."
I understand people don't like this kind of OCR stuff for privacy reasons, but selecting text from images is probably the most useful feature added to iOS in the last ~5 years for me.
It could be even more useful if performed on demand, e.g. long-press on photo region with text.
Isnt that exactly how it works?
[delayed]
It seems that one can't turn off the resource-hogging "knowledgeconstructiond" even in Sequioa.
Maybe Apple could offer a $200 upgrade on Mac purchase to get it without all of the Apple Intelligence features?
This is becoming a more serious problem now Siri is going to be Google powered.
Supposedly there is no data shared with Google when using Gemini-powered Siri:
Google’s model will reportedly run on Apple’s own servers, which in practice means that no user data will be shared with Google. Instead, they won’t leave Apple’s Private Cloud Compute structure.[1]
1: https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/05/google-gemini-1-billion-deal-...
My org disables Siri on the work laptop, I’m new to having a mac at work, so not sure if it’s the norm
My work does the same thing. Logging into iCloud is not allowed and last I checked, it was actually disabled. So that means no Siri, Facetime, etc.
siriactionsd and siriknowledged power Shortcuts and Siri Suggestions. You will need to disable those features if you want to kill those daemons.
How do you disable Shortcuts?
Honestly I have no idea if they have the best answer, but I thoroughly respect a blog post like this that is so concise/wastes no time. Here is the issue, here is what we want to do, here is what it won’t do, ultimately this is the best solution we have come up with + clear instructions.
The Eclectic Light has been the best Mac technology blog for years, often serving as the only source of knowledge for how some of the more obscure system components work.
Howard Oakley, the guy behind it, seems to be a bit of a “renaissance man.” He’s a retired MD, who is also an artist.
People like him are an inspiration to me.
Good to know!
A small but big detail that irritates me is one used to be able to search Applications faster through the dedicated Applications overlay, but now this behavior appears to just be a shortcut to Spotlight, which suffers from incredibly poor index planning.
In the past, when Spotlight was too slow to show me my most used applications by the first few letters, I'd bail and use Applications.
Now I'd have to use Finder, but opening that up would be slow enough that I'd almost need a desktop shortcut.
So, in essence, I have to hack around the most common functionality of using an application on an operating system, which is finding the damn thing. And this is supposed to be the most polished operating system on the market?
Apple frequently appears to be asleep at the wheel.
Yeah, I used to have a hot corner set up so that I could fling my mouse towards the upper left and then type the first letter or two of the app name, just like in Gnome.
Now that causes the screen to freeze for half a second (possibly my fault - I have 'reduce animations' switched on, but it seems to freeze the screen for the duration of the animation that would previously have played), and then the colour wheel spins for a couple of seconds, and then it might finally respond to my keyboard input... but even then, it fails to find the app maybe 20% of the time. This is on a ~1yo M4 Macbook Pro w/ 36 GB RAM.
So for the past month I've been training myself to alt+tab round to the finder window and navigate to the apps folder from there.
I've never been much of a Macos fan, but this is shockingly poor - less of a papercut, more a wedge of smouldering bamboo shoved under my fingernails.
On the other side of the fence, I enjoy the new Spotlight-for-Applications that opens when I hit the touch bar key (I still have an M1) for the old Launchpad. It seems to sort programs by frequency, so it knows that I open Ghostty far more often than Ghostery, and typing "Gh" will bring me to Ghostty instead of Ghostery. In the old Launchpad, applications were always presented alphabetically when you began typing, so Ghostery always was selected instead of Ghostty. I had to type "gh" right key enter before, but now just I just hit "gh" enter.