Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I had this, in a major way. Activity Monitor showed greater that 100% CPU at ALL TIMES. My 2022 M2 became unusable, freezing, pinwheeling etc. Just like all these descriptions. I searched here and in other forums online, and I tried the many suggestions (short of reinstalling the system software). None of the resolutions fixed the issue. Eventually, I read one post that eluded to large Pages docs with many edits, especially those stored on iCloud Drive potentially contributing to the issue. I've been working on a 100+ page town report in Pages. It coincided with the worsening corespotlightd CPU issues, and it has had a truly enormous number of edits. While the doc isn't exactly huge (like 32 mb's?) the number of edits stored in it practically rival the number of atoms in the known universe.

So here's what I did: I created and saved a copy of this file, and also emailed a copy to myself out of caution. Then I moved the copy file (and it's associated files in it's folder) to my desktop, and I checked the "keep downloaded" option... I triple checked that my backup copy was current and working, and then I (terrifyingly) deleted the original file which was the result of hundreds of hours of work. I then restarted my Mac. I opened activity monitor and the issue is completely gone. corespotlightd is now using POINT one percent of my CPU.

My theory is that it was attempting to not just index the file itself, but also every single tiny edit I had done... perhaps as part of the "revert to" feature? Each nudge of a line or copy/paste of a section or tiny movement of an image... it was saving and indexing them all. When I made a copy, all that data was left behind. The new file has no undo's available. And voila, my Mac is working like it should again. What a relief!

Hope this helps somebody out there, because what a terrible experience it was for a while there.

Here's my experience write up and fix after messing around for hours on my Tahoe 26.5 version M1 MacBook Pro, where I was getting the spinning buffer logo, mouse disconnect, and activity monitor consistently showing core spotlight at ~120%+ CPU.

The Fix

The culprit:  corespotlightd inflated ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight to 208 GB. The bloated folder was the actual problem; corespotlightd maxing the CPU was just the symptom.

Step 1 — Tried the settings toggles first (didn't fix it):

In System Settings → Spotlight (scroll to the bottom of that pane for "Search results" / category list, with "Help Apple Improve Search" and related options below):

• Unticked Show Related Content — no effect, but keeping off
• Unticked Help Apple Improve Search — no effect, but keeping off
• Unticked results from Applications (and other categories in that same window) — no effect

Step 2 — Found the real problem via Finder:

Navigated to ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight, right-clicked the CoreSpotlight folder → Get Info → saw the size: 208 GB. (Had to use Finder because Terminal couldn't read it.)

Step 3 — Deleted it, which fixed it:

Granted Terminal Full Disk Access (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access → enable Terminal → quit and reopen Terminal), then:

rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight

Folder dropped to zero, rebuilt to a normal ~110 MB, corespotlightd went quiet. Fixed.

When I turned spotlight for apps back on it increased in size to about 500mb in an hour, but still no CPU usage issues.

What did NOT work

• Getting the folder size from Terminal (** -sh) — blocked until Terminal had Full Disk Access; had to use Finder → Get Info instead
• Turning off indexing (sudo mdutil -i off /)
• Turning off searching (sudo mdutil -d /)
• Deleting the volume-level store (.Spotlight-V100) — SIP-blocked, "Operation not permitted"
• Re-enabling / rebuilding the index (sudo mdutil -E /, mdutil -i on)
• Restarting the computer
• Killing the process (sudo killall -9 corespotlightd) repeatedly — it just respawns
• Turning off iCloud sync for Pages
• Quitting Pages/Outlook, the launchctl bootout attempts (SIP-blocked)

All of those are the standard Spotlight-troubleshooting playbook — they just don't touch this bug, because the problem was a pre-existing 208 GB folder, not active indexing. Only deleting the folder addressed it.

I wanted to share what finally resolved this for me after weeks of intermittent freezing on a MacBook Air 15-inch M4 2025.

Symptoms:

Intermittent system freezes/beachballs

• corespotlightd frequently at 150–200% CPU (viewed in Activity Monitor)
• Mac becoming very hot
• Rapid battery drain
• CoreSpotlight folder had grown to around 320 GB

Apple Support helped me resolve it. The steps they gave me were:

1. Update MacOS and Pages to the latest version (they suspected it was contributing to the issue).
2. Go to ~/Library/Metadata/.
3. Rename the CoreSpotlight folder to CoreSpotlightOld.
4. Restart the Mac.
5. macOS creates a new CoreSpotlight folder automatically.
6. Once I’d confirmed everything was working, delete CoreSpotlightOld.

After doing this, the new CoreSpotlight folder was only about 3 GB instead of 320 GB, CPU usage returned to normal, and the freezing stopped.

I’m continuing to monitor it, but so far this has made a dramatic difference! This thread was very helpful, thank you.

I've had similar problems with all four of my Macs (a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra, a MacBook Pro with an M2 Max, an iMac Pro, and a 17-inch 2020 iMac with an 8-core Core i7). On all four systems, I noted sometime around when 15.1.1 came out that corespotlightd would frequently top the list of processes, using anything from 100% CPU all the way to 750%(!) of CPU (on the iMac), causing the fans to spin up on the Intel systems to annoying levels. Updating to 15.2 did not resolve the issue for me, and in fact may have worsened it.

I did notice that corespotlightd calmed down quite a bit simply by closing a large Pages doc (200+ MB), and even more reliably by simply closing Pages on systems where I wasn't actively editing documents (at least, documents that are synced to iCloud). Corespotlightd will still occasionally ramp up to 100+% of CPU, but it won't stay there indefinitely, and most of the time it will be under 50%.

But another more serious issue: I found that after I installed 15.1.1, I could no longer back up the Intel systems via Time Machine. If I tried, one or both situations would arise: (i) a Time Machine backup would be "preparing" for hours or even days; and (ii) attempting such backups would frequently lead to repeated kernel-panics. The only resolution for this latter issue I have found is to disable Time Machine backups entirely. Even starting a backup on a freshly-erased backup drive with no existing Time Machine backups would still lead to the same behavior vis à vis interminable "preparation" of backups and repeated kernel panics.

One thing occurred to me during all of this trouble-shooting: I believe that Time Machine relies on Spotlight to identify files which have been modified since the last backup. I think it may be there is some bug in corespotlightd that aside from consuming vast system resources, also leads to complete (albeit short-lived) system freezes where they don't cause a kernel panic, and also interferes with the proper operation of Time Machine.

Okay, I have a new hypothesis as to what's going on here with corespotlightd. This process is one of at least four that are responsible for macOS's Spotlight functionality. The three others are mds, mdworker, and md_stores. I cribbed the following descriptions of these three processes from the HowToGeek website:

The two processes [mds and mdworker] are part of Spotlight, the macOS search tool. The first, mds, stands for metadata server. This process manages the index used to give you quick search results. The second, mdworker, stands for metadata server worker. This does the hard work of actually indexing your files to make that quick searching possible.

And for md_stores, from the TechNewsToday site:

Mds_stores is the core indexing process of the macOS. On normal days, it usually takes up a noticeable [sic, probably should be un-noticeable] amount of CPU. However, when you reinstall your OS or add new files/directories, your system will automatically start to reindex these new databases, which sees the mds_stores CPU usage skyrocket.

The macOS Spotlight feature makes use of two processes for indexing the system database; mds and mds_stores. The mds (Metadata Server) process is responsible for tracking and recording files and folders in your operating system. md_stores then compiles and manages these mds metadata, which Spotlight later uses for searching certain documents within your OS.

So it may be that corespotlightd is in fact an unwitting victim of other processes' having gone awry. On my two Intel systems, by three months after installing macOS 15.0, metadata associated with Spotlight located at ~/library/metadata had reached half a terabyte on both systems. It sounds like this data was actually written out by either mdworker, mds_stores, or both. And then, corespotlightd has to wade through these gigabytes upon gigabytes of metadata to actually produce search results, and as that task gets harder and harder with more and more metadata being produced, eventually Spotlight search results (which includes search and smart folders through Mail) degrade to the point of uselessness.

While I haven't managed to halt the rapid growth of metadata on these two Intel systems (Apple Silicon Macs still have the issue but to a much milder degree), simply deleting the metadata out of the ~/library/metadata/Corespotlight and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (while leaving the folders themselves intact) resulted in a near-immediate improvement in three areas: greatly reduced use of storage space; vastly improved search results; and much lower processor utilization by corespotlightd.

As noted, this metadata still continues to pile up (especially if I have a large (>5 MB) Pages file open). But if I have to empty out these two folders once every few weeks until Apple resolves the issue, that's not the end of the world).

fronesis47 wrote:

I have just now again deleted the entire corespotlight folder in (in the library folder) and the preferences file you mentioned, but I think I see the corespotlight folder already growing again. We'll see.

This has been my experience too. An hour or so after deleting the contents of these folders, I'll see a few GB of metadata accumulating already. And if I have a Pages file open, that growth will continue. Just a week after deleting all of this metadata (on a computer that had a particular Pages file open and being edited more or less continuously), the CoreSpotlight folders had already grown to over 100 GB.

In my experience, having a Pages file open on a system, at least a large one, but even if you're not actually editing it, seems to accelerate the accumulation of metadata. On one of my systems I had a ~14 MB Pages file open, and metadata seemed to accumulate at 10-20 GB per day. Closing that one file when I wasn't actively editing it greatly slowed down the accumulation of metadata.

As noted elsewhere, my hypothesis is that when you have a Pages file open (especially if you're editing it), the various Spotlight processes don't just reindex the changes; they re-index the entire file, and not by replacing existing metadata but by adding to it. In my case, the Pages files in question are synced via iCloud and are being edited on multiple Macs. It seems that if you close the file, then edit it on another computer, and then later re-open it, Spotlight reindexes the entire file, but only that one time (until you edit it some more). If you leave it open while you're editing it on another system, the same thing happens: Spotlight seems to reindex the entire file with every edit. This can add tens of gigabytes a day of metadata on a file that might only be a few megabytes in size.

Until Apple releases a fix for this issue (which may or may not ever happen), I think the best way to avoid rapid accumulations of metadata is to close Pages files when you're not actively editing them. Even having them open on another system and editing them there (if they're synced via iCloud) will still lead to vast quantities of metadata creation, as much at 20 GB a day.

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.

After the better part of another day thinking about and troubleshooting this issue, I am convinced that Eric Murphy's earlier hypothesis is correct. There's a bug in Sequoia, which anyone can replicate by following these 2 steps:

1. Open a Pages file (and keep it open).
2. Watch the size of this folder balloon: ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight

The larger that folder gets, the more likely it is that the corespotlightd process will start taking over the CPU and causing slowdowns for the Mac user. The corespotlightd process is what gets most people's attention, but it's only a symptom of the underlying problem whereby the spotlight processes (mdworker, etc.) write enormous amounts of data into the corespotlight subfolders.

The bigger the Pages file the quicker the folder grows in size; the more frequently one uses Pages, or leaves Pages files open, the worse the problem.

There is no fix until apple implements one, and the only viable workaround is to monitor the size of that folder and occasionally delete it.

One silver lining: it's not clear to me that there is any need to delete your spotlight index, to turn indexing off and on, etc. The problem stems from the size of that metadata folder, and you can alleviate the problem by deleting the folder. In my experience (having deleted the folder many dozen times), spotlight works just fine without rebooting, reindexing, or anything else.

I came up with my own way of dealing with this issue: I wrote a simple shell script that trashes the corespotlightfolder; then I added that as a service in launchd so that it can run regularly (maybe every 2 days).

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.

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.

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.