The joy of Spotlight: importing my gigabyte of archives mail (from my Eudora mailboxes, which I kept up to date all this time because I feared Opera would hold my data hostage), the computer lags, CPU load is 100%, iPulse indicates it’s all in the system layer (which means it isn’t Mail.app per se hogging the CPU, but Spotlight running behind), the CPU temperature is 77°C (that’s 170°F according to Dashboard — exactly when is the fan supposed to start spinning like crazy and sounding like a jet taking off?). Accidentally quitting Mail.app (which doesn’t bother to ask me if I really wanted to, and I should be glad it wasn’t while it was importing one of the biggest mailboxes), putting the computer to sleep, and as soon as I wake it up the CPU is at 100% again, and it’s still Spotlight, catching up.

Of course, it isn’t such a big deal for me, as it’ll only happen once, but I wonder how Spotlight must make your computer crawl if you have subscribed to one of those big, chatty mailing lists.

P.S. Spotlight a Stoplight for Video Pros:

Both 10.4 and 10.4.1 are causing problems for video work, and a vast majority of these problems are caused by Spotlight’s insistence upon indexing hard drives. As the post notes, “You can manually tell each drive to not be indexed, but that’s EACH TIME you mount them or reboot. That’s no good.”