Do ZFS and spotlight have any relation?

[youminbuluo]

I am now using a pool of ZFS and spotlight seems quite slow.

[Jason Belec]

Can you provide more info, your question is a little foggy?

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

[youminbuluo]

After I copied 100+ data to a zfs pool, the spotlight start to index
and get several times stuck at remain 5 hours. I restarted the
computer to get out of this and finally it finished. And this has
never been before when I used hfs+. So I asked this question:)

On Dec 30, 8:11 pm, Jason Belec <jasonbe...@rogers.com> wrote:
> Can you provide more info, your question is a little foggy?
>
> Jason
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

[Jason Belec]

I believe it's a meta data issue. ZFS does not handle this information the way Apple's highly modified HFS+ does. I'm setting up a test tomorrow on a new system and I'll run some tests. I don't currently utilize Spotlight (Quicksilver instead).

Will report back.

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

[youminbuluo]

So what u mean is that I should stop using spotlight?
I also confirm when spotlight stopped indexing, I have to shutdown
manually. At the meanwhile, I found kernel cpu usage is high,about
40%.

On Dec 31, 10:51 am, Jason Belec <jasonbe...@rogers.com> wrote:
> I believe it's a meta data issue. ZFS does not handle this information the way Apple's highly modified HFS+ does. I'm setting up a test tomorrow on a new system and I'll run some tests. I don't currently utilize Spotlight (Quicksilver instead).
>
> Will report back.
>
> Jason
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

[youminbuluo]

you can try http://media.alfredapp.com/alfred_0.8_89.dmg
It seems better than QS.
And I also find spotlight won't show any files on other pool. I mean I
created a Data pool and a Data/Applications pool. Spotlight only
searches Data. Data and Data/Application seem parallel. It's some kind
of odd.

On Dec 31, 10:51 am, Jason Belec <jasonbe...@rogers.com> wrote:

> I believe it's a meta data issue. ZFS does not handle this information the way Apple's highly modified HFS+ does. I'm setting up a test tomorrow on a new system and I'll run some tests. I don't currently utilize Spotlight (Quicksilver instead).
>
> Will report back.
>
> Jason
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>

[Alex Blewitt]

On 31 Dec 2010, at 04:45, youminbuluo <youmi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> And I also find spotlight won't show any files on other pool. I mean I
> created a Data pool and a Data/Applications pool. Spotlight only
> searches Data. Data and Data/Application seem parallel. It's some kind
> of odd.

>
Spotlight isn't fully working with ZFS at the moment. The problem is that OSX thinks the ZFS mount is one filesystem (since they share the same device identifier) and so the pool indexes content to the root of the pool which then doesn't work.

We can implement the "searchfs" callback in ZFS to facilitate this but there may be a better way with registering a computed device id for sub filesystems (there's some code in the 10a286 code in the temp snapshot registration that does similar). I've already integrated some of it into the untested branch but that's not ready yet.

Alex

[Jason Belec]

OK now we don't want to start the 'this seems better' thong do we? Personal choice maybe.....

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

[Jason Belec]

Yes, found the notes. One of the reasons I guess I no longer use it. Ran a test on a new machine after adding ZFS and Spotlight Indexing really does have issues.

This does cause some issues if your using/developing with AppleScript that I ran across a year back. Certain things in AppleScript are tied to Spotlight thus don't function 'directly' with ZFS. Easily worked around if course, but worth mentioning as it pertains to the Spotlight feature.

Jason

Sent from my iPhone

[Alex Blewitt]

On Jan 3, 2011, at 09:52, Timothy Brown wrote:

> Are there any plans to fix spotlight integration in the future?—or
> is this an insolvable problem?

Like anything else, it's probably not insurmountable but a function of
time. Here are a few issues to look out for:

http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/issues/detail?id=8
http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/issues/detail?id=65
http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/issues/detail?id=68

Alex