Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

luzggg wrote:

Currently trying this out to fix that bug myself, and I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing. So I just want to make extra sure I got what you're saying. Now when you said deleting the metadata out of Corespotlight and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents, can I just delete everything inside those folders? Not working with Terminal here. Or keep the folders inside intact and just delete the lists and whatever is in there? Thanks!

When I spoke to Apple Support last week, the advisor suggested I delete the contents of the two folders (the entire contents, files and any subfolders; you don't need to go through each subfolder and laboriously delete its contents individually), but not the folders themselves. You don't need to do this from Terminal; you can just trash the files/subfolders from the Finder the way you would normally do it (just make sure you're in the User library, not the System library, which you can make visible on the "Go" menu in the Finder by holding down the Option key).

Other users have said they've been successful deleting the entire folders, contents and all, without ill effects. But having removed the folder contents themselves without deleting the actual folders, I've obtained satisfactory results all three times I've done it, on two different systems (twice on one of them).

Also note that the folder structure in the ~/library/metadata/ folder differs from Intel systems compared to Apple Silicon systems. On Intel systems, the CoreSpotlight/ folder and the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/ folder are both at the root of the Metadata/ folder. On Apple Silicon systems, the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/ folder is inside the CoreSpotlight folder. I have yet to try this fix on an Apple Silicon system since it hasn't been necessary for me, but it sounds like you can delete the entire contents of the CoreSpotlight/ folder without any problems.

Hi everyone. I also encountered this issue that corespotlightd was slugging down my M1 MBP 16GB (2021) so immensely that my system had a freeze for around 5-8 seconds every minute or so.

Reading that according to your findings it might be related to large Pages files it got my attention because I'm currently working on my Thesis and use Zotero with lots of indexing and caching. I assumed this might be the limit of this machine but that thought was strange because I worked on so much more taxing tasks and it just performed good enough that the operating system was still performant enough. My Thesis file currently only has half a MB (currently mainly text) so that can't be the issue I thought.

After working for days like this (it really gets frustrating) I decided to invest some time in troubleshooting again. Before that I tried to reindex Spotlight (through System Settings and Terminal) or cleared up some space but nothing did the trick. Also not even turning off Apple Intelligence which I thought could be the culprit made a difference. Until I stumbled upon some thread somewhere which just generally stated that deleting the Cache Folder in Library (Finder>Go>Go To Folder>~/Library/Caches) might help or not but it's generally not a bad idea to clean it out from time to time. Well I didn't do that for like 4 years! Which actually speaks for the rigidity of macOS.

I went to that folder and it had a size about 50GB and literally right after deleting it the freezes and the high CPU usage of corespotlightd went away. I now waited several hours to see if it was just something temporary but it seems like this was indeed the solution.

And I forgot to mention: I upgraded from 15.2 to 15.3 several days ago and it seems like something in the Cache became corrupted or faulty (be it system files or app files) and caused corespotlightd to go rampant.

So in short: give the cleanup of the ~/Library/Caches folder a try. It might help and solve this high CPU usage of corespotlightd. Hope this helps anyone.

Update: Running 15.3 on a 2022 M2 MacBook Air. I followed others and trashed the entire ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder 3 days ago on 2/10/25. Since then I only turn on Pages when I use it - which I have continued to do so. I also, split off some subtopics into their own documents so I wasn't having very large graphics heavy files open and editing all over the place in different sections. I do continue to save frequently- an old habit. My CoreSpotlight folder reappeared right away and the computer problems ceased. The folder is currently at 2.4 Gb compare to over 58 Gb when it was having difficulty. I have only 8 Gb of Memory if that matters. We did try one additional step before trashing CoreSpotlight. We turned OFF that process in the Activity Monitor. That seemed to cause a slight decrease in the folder size ~50Gb. But the effect was temporary of course as the process restarted.

Thanks to everyone - I hope Apple takes notice.

It’s been a week since my last post (about corespotlightd spiking with Pages v14.4 documents open) on my M4 MacBook Air (Sequoia 15.5), and my temporary solution.

That temporary solution - opening all Pages documents from local (not iCloud) folders - continues to work successfully after more than a week: that is, corespotlightd has NOT spiked at all.

I can add some more colour:  with Activity Monitor open (with the corespotlightd process permanently tracked):

working on my numerous, (very large) local Pages documents, corespotlightd is inactive (i.e. 0%.);

if I then open very large Numbers files that ARE located in iCloud (iCloud/Documents), the corespotlightd process begins but does not spike. If I leave these Numbers documents in iCloud open in the background, corespotlightd ticks over at 0.2%.

So for me, on my M4 MacBookAir (Sequoia 15.5, Pages 14.4)  I have a repeatable, persistent, demonstrable bug:

Pages documents located in iCloud/Documents: starts the corespotlightd process which then spikes @ >100% (and only a Sequoia reinstall stops the process);

Pages documents located in local SSD: corespotlightd = 0%

More colour: As I have mentioned previously, Pages has form in process spiking: mdworker in 2013 and AppleSpell in 2019.

If others on this thread experience corespotlightd spiking under different circumstances, there may be more than one issue . . . but as I say, my particular issue is repeatable, demonstrable and [at least after one week] avoidable through a [hopefully] temporary workaround.

I hope Apple is working on this issue. (Pages was last updated to 14.4 on April 3, 2025.)

For me, too, the issue clearly appears to be related to iCloud. I already have an automator process in place that deletes the spotlight metadata folder every single day, but even that does not alleviate the problem altogether. After a few hours with Pages documents open, the system starts to freeze up, and corespotlightd runs at over 100% CPU. Even deleting the metadata folder every day, it quickly grows to over 50GB.

Hearing from your experiences, I took the Pages files that I am working on out of iCloud. So far, after several days of working this way, the problem is non-existent. Corespotlightd does not even appear in Activity Monitor. However, as soon as I open a pages document in iCloud and start to make some edits, within a minute or so corespotlightd appears at the top again.

For reference, I'm working on an M2 Macbook Air.

I totally understand your frustration regarding Pages corespotlightd spiking. The lack of response from Apple is unusual: 

Back in 2013 and again in 2019, Pages was causing process spiking for mdworker and AppleSpell respectively. 

In both cases, I reported issues via Apple’s Feedback Web pages and was contacted by Apple, asked to install profiles, emailed the files back to Apple, and the issues were fixed. 

I posted a temporary Pages corespotlightd solution a month ago - do not use Pages with iCloud Drive - and it it is still effective. In case you have not seen that post:

Move any extant Pages files you want to open on your local SSD (i.e. not in iCloud Drive) before you open them.  When you create a new Pages file, immediately save it to your local SSD.

This works because if your Pages files lives in iCloud Drive, Pages triggers  corespotlightd   . . . which then spikes to > 200% and slows down your Mac  to the point of un-useability even after Pages is quit. (When corespotlightd is spiking, the only way to stop it, is to reinstall MacOS.)

I have the base variant of the Apple Mac Mini with M4 SoC (16GB RAM + 256GB storage).

About three days ago, I installed macOS Tahoe 26.0 (stable). A few hours later, I received a notification that my Mac is low on storage. When I went to the desktop to check free space on Macintosh HD, I saw that it was 5GB. However, that number automatically started climbing up, and it went up to 40GB, which is what I think was available before.

After that, the PC started freezing. There was a huge delay in mouse movements and app switching, and apps were taking too much time to process a task. So, I went to Activity Monitor and noticed that corespotlightd and kernal_task were taking too much CPU power (both were at around 100%). At that point, I had six apps open actively: Chrome, Mail, Messages, Slack, WhatsApp, and Pages. Plus, there were four apps running in the background: 1Password, Paste, Plex Media Server, and Popclip.

First, I closed all the apps, but that didn't fix the problem. Second, I restarted the PC, but that didn't work either. Third, I deleted the only Pages document I had, which was 'Untitled' (saved in iCloud > Pages), but that also didn't work. Fourth, I have the base variant of the MacBook Pro with M1 SoC as well. I fired it up and found that Pages was one of the apps open in it, and it was displaying the Untitled document that I had deleted from my Mac Mini M4, and the app gave me an option to keep the document or delete it. I chose to delete it, but this didn't solve my problem either.

So, I searched about the issue and stumbled upon this thread. Before doing what people suggested in this discussion, here's what I did, and it solved the problem:

1. I opened Settings > Spotlight and went ahead with Reset Quick Keys and Delete Search History (it didn't fix the problem).
2. SOLUTION - From the top of the Spotlight settings page, I started turning off toggles one by one, including Show Related Content, all the toggles in the Results from Apps and Results from System sections, and Clipboard Search. When I did that, in Activity Monitor, corespotlightd disappeared from the top. Plus, kernal_task also stopped taking high CPU resources. With that, my PC started responding/performing normally (as fast as before).
3. Now, in Settings > Spotlight, I started turning the toggles on from the bottom of the page (from Clipboard Search to Show Related Content). Whenever I turned a toggle on, corespotlightd CPU usage went to around 16% and then came back down.
4. So, I turned all the toggles on, and fortunately, the PC was responding properly, and corespotlightd and kernal_task didn't suffer from high CPU usage. I then opened all the apps, including Pages, and my PC is responding normally (fast). It has been two hours since then, and my Mini M4 is working perfectly.

For people seeing high CPU usage for corespotlightd and kernal_task, they should try doing this. It should fix the problem. I don't know if anyone mentioned this solution before or not. I hope this helps you.

I had this trouble with Sequoia and posted what I learned by talking to Apple support some time ago. It happened again with the Tahoe update, so I repeated what worked before. In Finder, I went to ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and deleted large folders. That solved the problem. I keep reviewing those folders and deleting them when they grow over a few GB. One time while in that location, I actually saw the a few folders rapidly increasing in size as I watched. This works. I plan to repeat the process preemptively with all new OS upgrades.

Two quick updates from me:

1. To everyone who has joined this thread late: the workaround (there is no solution) to this problem is NOT to make spotlight reindex, to turn off indexing, to turn off (or on) AI stuff, or to try to force the corespotlightd not to run. None of those things will work. The workaround is to delete the corespotlight folder in ~/Library/Metadata. When that folder is on the small side, the corespotlightd process does not cause problems.
2. I can now report back on my own experiment: I've got a script that runs every 2 or so days and automatically deletes the corespotlight folder. I've now been running for more than a week and (knock on wood) everything is fine. I never notice any issues deleting the folder, and by deleting it every couple of days it usually stays under 2 gigs in size (though I've seen it as high as 5 gigs). In my experience, the problems don't start until the folder gets north of 25 Gbs.

Mitch Stone wrote:

Just to be clear, everything we suggest here can be nothing more than a Band-Aid. Only Apple can provide the fix. We are told Apple engineering is monitoring this discussion, so any real-world experiences we can document, and anything that works even as a temporary solution, not only helps us manage the problem in the short term, but perhaps will also point Apple towards the permanent solution we all want.

All this said, based on the now 12(!) pages of discussion since I started this thread, I have become convinced that the problem is Spotlight trying to index documents with a large number of edits. This is exactly how it manifested for me, with an 80k word Pages document being edited by two people with Track Changes turned on. Between us, this resulted in probably more than a thousand edits. Towards the end of the editing, I was seeing beach balling every time I opened this document for more than a few minutes at a time, and had one kernel panic.

Once this editing process was completed, I Finder copied the document. I can now open and make additional edits to the copy without incident. If I watch Activity Monitor (I leave it open in Stage Manager with corespotlightd selected), I will see some spikes in the process, but they are not nearly as high or as prolonged as before, and I also don't see any beach balls. To me, this proves the theory pretty conclusively.

Just to add to Mitch's experiences: I am an inveterate journal-keeper, writing in Pages on a daily basis. It needn't be emphasized that a daily journal grows over time, and by the last couple of months of the year, my Pages journal file is typically over a thousand pages, 750k words or more, which with dozens of embedded graphics will result in a file size between 200–300 MB. Moreover, after nearly a year, we're talking literally tens of thousands of edits. When I was first researching this issue at the beginning of this year, I discovered that my Spotlight metadata had increased on two Intel systems to over 500 GB each. On both machines, Time Machine had essentially ground to a halt, Spotlight search results were useless, both systems suffered multiple kernel panics, and corespotlightd would sometimes pin all CPU cores on both systems, using as much as 1400% of CPU time spread across all sixteen cores (eight of which are virtual hyperthreading cores).

For me, deleting Corespotlight metadata resolved all of these issues. Not permanently; I have to weed out the metadata folders every week to ten days. But so long as I keep that metadata below ~50 GB (on relatively high-performance systems with lots of storage space), my computer life remains pretty peaceful. So long as I remember to quit Pages when I'm not actually using it.

But that said, I was editing my journal file last night, and with that one file open in Pages, which is about 18.5 MB, I watched Spotlight metadata grow by literally a megabyte per second or more, for as long as the file was open. In a single day that would add thousands if not tens of thousands of MB of metadata. But as soon as I quit Pages, metadata growth stopped in its tracks, and was the same value this morning before I left for work, twelve hours later.

YMMV, obviously, but for me these kinds of results could not be more dispositive of the problem here: Spotlight coupled with Pages files with many edits.

In my year-plus of dealing with this issue, I've reached the following conclusions (which may not be generalizable to other users, but they seem to at least be consistent for my particular use case):

• The problem is significantly more severe on Intel systems than on Apple Silicon systems.
• The problem, at least in my case, is strongly linked to editing large Pages files. On my two Intel systems (a 27-inch iMac and an iMac Pro), I only regularly edit large Pages files on the former. CoreSpotlight metadata accumulates rapidly, getting to 40 GB or more every few days to maybe a week at most. On the latter system where I rarely edit large Pages files, CoreSpotlight metadata has only accumulated to about 25 GB since August.
• Deleting metadata when it approaches or exceeds 40 GB (on systems with 32 GB or more RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage) seems to prevent the various Spotlight processes from consuming large amounts of CPU time and interfering with system stability/responsiveness. Since this fix works for me, I've been able to continue to edit large Pages files which are synced via iCloud without killing system responsiveness.
• On Apple Silicon systems, the amount of CoreSpotlight metadata appears to wax and wane, presumably as macOS deletes out-of-date metadata.
• On Intel systems, metadata only seems to accumulate, unless the system is restarted (after say a software update). Frequently after a restart, I have seen CoreSpotlight metadata decline from say 25 GB to <10 GB.

While this clearly doesn't work for everyone, I have found that I can maintain system stability and responsiveness by a) closing large Pages documents (and quitting Pages entirely) when not actively editing them; and b) keeping an eye on the CoreSpotlight folder in ~/Library/Metadata, and deleting the contents of the folder when it approaches or exceeds ~40 GB (a value that may be different if your system has more, or less, RAM and/or storage.

Just to provide an update and add more context to the discussion:

I'm no longer experiencing any hiccups, mini-freezes, or beachballing. While I’m currently writing my thesis in Pages, my issue might not have been directly related to the app after all.

A few key points:

• I'm working entirely with iCloud files (Pages), and while corespotlightd still spikes occasionally, it does so as expected and without causing any slowdowns.
• kernel_task and corespotlightd are no longer consuming excessive CPU resources.

The turning point seemed to be when I deleted my 50GB ~/Library/Caches folder. After restarting, the system automatically rebuilt the Cache folder, but it has remained steady at around 600MB ever since.

Additionally, I reset my Spotlight index, first via System Settings and then using Terminal with sudo commands to wipe and rebuild it. After indexing completed (which took around an hour or so), my ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder settled at around 30GB. Despite its size, my system is now running as smoothly and responsively as I expect it to be.

I personally can't work without spotlight anymore and try to index most of the files on my system to have an extremely fast access via CMD+Space. What I'm trying to say is: although my Spotlight folder currently seems to be this big I'm not seeing any performance issues on my end.

Things too keep in mind about my situation:

• I'm not working on super big Pages files with file sizes over dozens of MBs
• I'm not using storage optimization via "Store in iCloud" in the storage settings
• I have updated from 15.2 to 15.3 with obviously very big Cache and Indexes (~/Library/Caches & ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight basically never emptied since I own this M1 MacBook from 2021 onwards)

CaptainJoy wrote:

tl;dr — trash your ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder

This has consistently been my experience. I start running into issues with Spotlight Search when this folder exceeds about 40 GB. The system runs into serious performance issues on my computers (which have 32+ GB RAM) when it gets above about 100 GB.

I'm a heavy Pages user, with 10+ MB Pages files open all the time, which seems to accelerate the growth of this folder. So once a week or so I just trash the entire folder.

It's kind of like mowing the lawn.