Spotlight hangs on ical item My iMac (early 2009) is super slow and spotlight and timemachine doesnt work at all. I am suspecting the the spotlight index (which never seem to finish) is behind some of the performance issues. I have reset the spotlight index and deleted the old files and restarted indexing. I am snooping the progress with this command: sudo opensnoop -n mdworker and then I can see that the indexing seems to halt on 0    169 mdworker       5 /.vol/16777218/695996 

I suspect that this is a calendar event? How can I see if spotlight indexing is crashing and restarting? I have let it run for hours and it never finishes.
Sounds like it's just stalling on a corrupt file.

Try typing

GetFileInfo /.vol/16777218/695996


into the Terminal to find out what the file is. 

If you're right about Spotlight stalling on a calendar event, try going into preferences and disabling the indexing of Events and Reminders. And then resetting spotlight.