Disable spotlight indexing
Booting into OS X Lion for the first time after install means spotlight reindexing all volumes. Opening Mail also triggers a full email migration to a new mail database format. This made my MacBook Pro pretty unresponsive for a while. Activity Monitor showed very little CPU utilisation, and a reasonable amount of free memory. Disk activity was clearly the culprit.
Time to disable spotlight for a while.
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn spotlight back on
sudo mdutil -a -i on
(Source: osxdaily.com)
