I have a Mac mini M1 running macOS Tahoe 26.6.2 acting as a file server. It shares an external APFS SSD via SMB to about 40 Mac users.
The shared folder contains approximately 250,000 files and is indexed by Spotlight on the server.
Finder search from a client Mac works, but behaves very strangely:
* Search results quickly reach exactly 100 items
* Finder then displays “Loading…”
* It remains at exactly 100 results for anywhere from about a minute to more than an hour, depending on the search
* Eventually Finder suddenly displays the complete result set — sometimes tens of thousands of files
For example, searching for budget from a client Mac eventually returned 27,134 results after about 32 minutes. Running the same budget search locally on the server with mdfind returned exactly the same 27,134 results in 6.9 seconds.
On the client, Finder fairly quickly displayed exactly 100 results, then remained at 100 with “Loading…” for most of those 32 minutes before suddenly displaying all 27,134 results.
I have tested this with multiple user accounts and multiple Macs, both on the local Ethernet network and over VPN. The behaviour is the same.
mdutil -s on the mounted SMB share reports:
Server search enabled.
I have also completely rebuilt the Spotlight index on the server, with no change.
Interestingly, Finder does not appear to be frozen during the long “100 results / Loading…” period. Process samples of Finder show a TNodeQuery Task doing SynchronizeChildren / FetchChildren and repeatedly fetching metadata through MDItemCopyAttribute. Once all results finally appear, that task is no longer present.
A packet capture also shows a large amount of SMB2 IOCTL/RPC-like traffic during the waiting period, rather than ordinary recursive directory enumeration.
I have reproduced the issue repeatedly with different search terms. I have also tested starting the search using both Finder’s search field and Command-F.
Has anyone else seen this specific behaviour — exactly 100 results followed by a very long “Loading…” period on a Spotlight-indexed SMB share?
In particular, I would be interested to know whether anyone has found a server-side SMB/Spotlight setting or macOS configuration that affects this behaviour.
The same files are searchable locally on the server very quickly, so this seems specifically related to Finder retrieving/processing Spotlight results over SMB rather than Spotlight indexing performance itself.
