Anyone notice poor Spotlight performance when a game is open?

[Echo S.]

I've had this issue for a while, and it's bugged me quite a bit.

When a game is open, Spotlight's search results for anything other than very commonly used apps becomes miserably slow. I understand that "Game Mode" is supposed to limit background processes which would include Spotlight, but I've noticed that even if a game is simply open/doing absolutely nothing, Spotlight is still painfully slow, even as it seems to be utilising quite a bit of CPU (up to 100% in activity monitor).

If this is a common problem, I'm hoping this is improved in Golden Gate...

 

[benholt]

Not gaming here but I see the same on my M2 Ultra whenever Redshift is chewing GPU on a render — Spotlight goes molasses even when the render isn't touching disk. My reading is Game Mode (or any Metal-exclusive foreground workload) hard-pins the app to the P-cluster and demotes mdworker3 / mds_stores to the E-cores. First hit against anything not in the frequent-app cache falls back to a full metadata scan on those slower cores, which is where the 100% CPU shows up — pop Activity Monitor with System Processes visible and you'll see mds_stores pegged. killall mds_stores clears it once the render or game is closed, doesn't help while it's running. I doubt Golden Gate changes the policy — starving non-foreground stuff is basically Game Mode's whole point.