Google Desktop For OS X August 31
I’m a huge fan of google desktop for OS X. I have hoards of pdf documents scattered around my hard drive (mostly docs for TeX macro packages installed with my TeXLive distribution) and google desktop is an awesomely useful way to look for whatever documentation I need. Frankly I think this is what spotlight should have been1.
Unfortunately one problem many people have with google desktop for mac is that it sometimes uses a bunch of system resources while indexing. I’ve seen lots of complaints about this on various mac sites but no solutions so I’ll post what I found made a big difference in case it helps anyone else.
Go to /Library/LaunchDaemons and open com.google.Desktop.Daemon.plist in Property List Editor (you probably need to change the permissions first so you will be able to save it). Now add two new keys at the Top level.
- Nice
- Number: 19
- LowPriorityIO
- Boolean: Yes
When you reboot the slowdown from indexing should be a lot less bothersome. Unfortunately what inspired me to make this post was I just had to repeat this modification when desktop upgraded itself and overwrote this plist. I’m not sure why google desktop doesn’t do this by default but it seems to work for me.
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More precisely I think spotlight should be split into a super version of the locate db with a big of metadata and something like google desktop. Much as I like google as a company this sort of functionality is better off integrated with the OS. I like to keep my recent web visits and stuff on my HD separate. Why gnu locate is still so simple is beyond me, maybe gnome or kde has some replacement I’m unaware of on linux. ↩
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