What's indexing why do I keep seeing it around a lot lately?

[shenfrey]

Whenever people complain about performance and often people simply reply "it's indexing". What is indexing and does it really cripple the performance?

 

[ideal.dreams]

Any time iOS is updated, Spotlight has to reindex the phone. Yes this does affect performance and battery life. The good news is, it's only temporary and shouldn't take long to finish. Indexing is how Spotlight is able to quickly refer results to you - it basically searches the whole phone after an update so it knows what's what, if that makes sense.

 

[lovewd]

Indexing is a word that die hard Apple fans use to explain the fact that Apple released terribly performing software today

 

[Salvor Hardin]

Indexing is a word that die hard Apple fans use to explain the fact that Apple released terribly performing software today

That doesn't mean that it's not a actual thing, if you run a benchmark like Geekbench right after updating you can see the impact for yourself.

 

[Solver]

Whenever people complain about performance and often people simply reply "it's indexing". What is indexing and does it really cripple the performance?

You can actually see the results of indexing by using one of the iOS CPU monitoring apps. When I first setup a new install of iOS 9 beta x, I would get up to just over 40% CPU usage when not using the device. After a time that would drop to under 10% with some brief spikes to about 20%. The higher the CPU, the more battery drain, and the hotter the device can get.

 

[KALLT]

But it typically won’t take that long. Only Apple’s default apps as well as third-party apps that are now using the new Spotlight APIs (only a few apps have been updated for this) will be indexed. Mostly Mail, Messages, Calendar events and Contacts. If you have many of those, it can take a bit longer.