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.

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.

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.

AshkaTheMoltenFury wrote:

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.

Unfortunately, I think that apple's default to "sort by rank" means that many people are MISSING the most important discoveries in this thread. The above WILL make things better, but only temporarily – it's treating the symptom, not the cause.

The cause of all this, as ericmurphy has laid out and a number of us have replicated, has to do with a problem with spotlight indexing of Pages files. Even if you clean everything out, as above, if you then open Pages files (especially larger ones) and keep them open, you can literally watch as the various mdworker processes write MASSIVE amounts of data into the core spotlight metadata folders. Depending on other aspects of your system, at some point that folder will get so big that the corespotlightd process will slow your Mac down.

• The temporary workaround is to regularly delete the metadata folders.
• The temporary and still very much less than ideal "fix" is to TURN OFF spotlight indexing.
• Any real solution here will require Apple to make some tweak to spotlight or Pages.

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.

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.

What I meant was that the problems I experienced stopped. My problems were the beach ball spinning and programs momentarily stopping, then starting. That started me looking for the cause. My goal is always to have the computers run smoothly. If I keep using them and these two problem happen again, the culprit is always large folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/. After I delete the specific folders that are ~ 2 GB or larger, the beach ball spinning and momentary program stopping does not happen.

The folders so far continue to balloon. Another indicator of the issue if the amount of disk space used. This increases with the above problems and the CoreSpotlight folders increasing in size. This disk space issue is also solved by deleting the folders. The space used always drops after deleting the folders - no surprise.

I spent hours reloading the OS and speaking with several levels of Apple support up to their highest level. One tech from the highest level suggested deleting the largest folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and it was the only suggestion that worked.

My M1 MBA had this problem with the Sequoia upgrade but it isn't nearly as bad with Tahoe. I haven't had to delete folders after doing it once or twice. My M4 iMac folders still ballon.

I hope this answers your question.

Thanks for alerting us to that MacWorld article. While the author mentions using Pages, he doesn't explicitly say if his documents are stored on iCloud Drive. However, his Activity Monitor screenshot shows fileproviderd, a major red flag for us, so it’s highly likely he’s in the same boat.

I’ve reached out to Michael directly with the following:

• Clarification: Asked if he specifically uses Pages with iCloud Drive.
• Potential Fix: Suggested upgrading to Pages v15.1 (compiled for Tahoe), which seems to be the fix for most of us.
• Hardware Warning: Alerted him to the massive size of the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ folder and the severe SSD wear.
• Data Evidence: Shared my DriveDX stats showing 200TB written in 4 months meaning my SSD could reach its lifespan limit in just 6 more months at this rate.

I’ll update the thread as soon as I hear back. It’s starting to feel like Apple may owe us compensation for the significant reduction in our hardware's lifespan due to this bug.

Can everyone check their SSD health? To build a stronger case, could everyone use DriveDX (or a similar SMART utility) to post their:

1. Power-on time (months/days)
2. Total Data Units Written (TB)
3. SSD Capacity (e.g., 512GB)