On 5/27/07, Piero D'Ancona pierodancona@gmail.com wrote:
Personal experience:
DevTools + 12G of papers (mostly pdf) on a Powerbook G4 1.5 with 512M: Spotlight is slow, close to painfully. Quicksilver much better (slowish)
DevTools + 18G of papers (mostly pdf) on a MacBook pro 2.33 with 3G (yay!): Spotlight is as fast as Quicksilver. First time you call Spotlight can be a bit slow to list results (3-5 sec), from the second time on it's very fast, like in Jobs' keynotes. I use Spotlight as an app launcher, would you believe it?
Piero
Yep, I do the same thing (Spotlight as an app launcher).
Yes, TextMate gets faster after the first time as does Spotlight. But Spotlight's first time is faster than TextMate's, and likewise, Spotlight's subsequent times are faster than TextMate's.
Also, I think Spotlight may be displaying results as they come in. TextMate seems to wait until it has completed the search. Improving that could make a difference.
Indexing would too. (The subsequent speedups are likely from operating system level file caching as someone pointed out.)
For reference, I have Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 3 GB. These improvements would probably help slower machines with less RAM even more.
-Chuck