Spotlight is a fantastic facility to help you find files, folders, e-mail, applications and other documents. It is lightning fast, and provides you with results also based on the contents of files, not just the metadata like, e.g., the UNIX find command. However there is one drawback: Running in the background, Spotlight creates an index for all the contents of a particular volume. After the initial full indexing scan, Spotlight uses file system events to determine which files have changed and (re-)indexes them. For network volumes with a lot of content changes, this results in a slowdown and unresponsiveness of all applications trying to access that volume.
The mdutil utility can be helpful in this case: The command
mdutil -i off /Volumes/homes0
for example turns off Spotlight indexing of your net work home directory. To verify this, wait a minute and type
mdutil -s /Volumes/homes0