It's speedy for the first few months, but once I build up a few dozen gigabytes of documents it starts to slow to an absolute crawl. Useful when searching for documents, absolutely, and faster than alternatives. But worthless for applications, which I open far more often than the average document (from a launcher, that is).
But that might be because my .Spotlight folder is > 1 gigabyte. And that's smaller than it has been in the past - my previous hard drive had it larger than 2 gb if I remember correctly, because I had tweaked it to index my source code. On my wife's computer it's only about 400 meg, and it finds applications in about a second (still much slower than Alfred or Quicksilver).
Seems like a simpler alternative here is to disable Spotlight indexing on everything but Applications and System Preferences. First thing I do on a new Mac.
Thereby losing all search for and within documents, when faster alternatives for the most-common action exists? It's a tradeoff I'd never make, but it makes sense, and then it'd probably be lightning-fast.
But that might be because my .Spotlight folder is > 1 gigabyte. And that's smaller than it has been in the past - my previous hard drive had it larger than 2 gb if I remember correctly, because I had tweaked it to index my source code. On my wife's computer it's only about 400 meg, and it finds applications in about a second (still much slower than Alfred or Quicksilver).