spotlight seems to be running on the macos-latest runners and taking up a lot of CPU

[graingert]

when debugging slow/flakey builds on macos I'm finding a process "mdworker-sizing" taking up a lot of CPU. This seems related to spotlight indexing:

I took the following screenshots using tmate on this CI action https://github.com/graingert/distributed/runs/5037116104?check_suite_focus=true

spotlight indexing appears to be enabled for / for the macos-latest runners. Should this be disabled by default?

[al-cheb]

If we disable spotlight service by default it will break some customers - #1760

[graingert]

does it have to be enabled for all of /? could it be disabled on the worker user directory?

[miketimofeev]

We will consider partially disabling spotlight with a proper announcement in the repository but I'm afraid no ETA for now as we have tasks with higher priority.

[igorboskovic3]

@graingert
Investigation showed that after boot up sequence indeed cpu utilization is from 23%-45%, which is used for indexing of all files by Spotlight and it takes from 3-4 minutes approximately. In addition if we exclude everything from /Applications folder (except Xcode, which was excluded in a first place and we had an issue regarding that exclusion, as you can see here) from indexing we will have approximately 1 minute less from that process. I thing its not enough for customer to resolve that issue. Also we can encounter further errors from those exclusions as we already did on exclusion of Xcode.

[igorboskovic3]

I will try one more thing, to exclude everything, except /Application and see if that can help