Estimating Index Time

[lpeedin]

Just completed an upgrade to ML and I was totally dismayed at how slow my system was doing anything. I pressed Cmd-Space to open the activity monitor only to find that Spotlight was hung on "Estimating Index Time". After about 30 minutes of searching here and on the web I determined that this appeared to be a somewhat common problem with other OS X upgrades but no real solution.

After about 45 minutes of it not progressing at all, I decided to try a shutdown and restart. Took a very long time for the shutdown to complete, but once it did the restart seemed back to its normal time and everything appears to be running OK now.

 

[nightlong]

Just completed an upgrade to ML and I was totally dismayed at how slow my system was doing anything. I pressed Cmd-Space to open the activity monitor only to find that Spotlight was hung on "Estimating Index Time". After about 30 minutes of searching here and on the web I determined that this appeared to be a somewhat common problem with other OS X upgrades but no real solution.

After about 45 minutes of it not progressing at all, I decided to try a shutdown and restart. Took a very long time for the shutdown to complete, but once it did the restart seemed back to its normal time and everything appears to be running OK now.

What is spotlight indexing actually doing?

 

[lpeedin]

Files are indexed on a system so they can be found quickly by Spotlight. Kinda like the index in the back of a text book that lists all the page numbers where a certain word can be found.