Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Just got off a 30 minute phone call with Apple Support. Their engineer team is aware of the issue and have been since February 8th, 2025. The person I spoke to added my case to the engineer team's file on the issue. They are also now aware of this thread. The person I spoke to read everything posted here. The thread itself is also now attached to their file.

I think everyone reading this with the same issue should contact Apple Support so they can have as much information as possible to fix this, in addition to making sure this gets resolved soon enough. They asked me to provide screenshots during the online chat portion, and over the phone they requested me to turn off my VPN (it didn't do anything), turn off and back on iCloud optimization (it didn't do anything), and boot into safe mode (it didn't do anything). They also wanted me to reinstall macOS but I made it clear that wasn't going to happen, and also that in another thread people already tried that in relation to corespotlightd to mixed results.

To do exactly what I did, go to Apple's website. Click Support on the right side of the screen. Scroll down to the section that says "Get Support" (it's quite large with a black button stating "Start Now" and a Memoji underneath). Under "View your products" click "Choose a product". Select your Mac. Click More. Scroll down and click Storage. Click continue. It should give you an option for a call or a chat. I originally opened a chat and clarified immediately what my actual issue was. When she eventually asked me reinstall the OS, I made it clear that I didn't actually expect a fix for this over Support, I simply wanted to get this issue to reach the attention of the people at Apple that could actually get this patched. So she scheduled a phone call for me with her seniors for several hours later at my convenience. (I contacted Support at like 3AM, if you chat with them during normal waking hours you'll likely get a scheduled call much sooner I'm assuming.)

The person I spoke to wouldn't add my case to their file unless I tried booting in Safe Mode to see if the issue was still present, so be prepared for that, or potentially anything else disruptive for them to give your case validity. If you start with a chat that moves to the phone then also have your case number ready because the person on the phone won't have access to your chat log otherwise. The person I spoke to was fantastic so I wouldn't worry about dealing with typical poor customer service like you would from other companies. The call happened 5 minutes after the scheduled time and the chat representative showed up almost immediately.

sugarskyline wrote:

The person I spoke to wouldn't add my case to their file unless I tried booting in Safe Mode to see if the issue was still present, so be prepared for that, or potentially anything else disruptive for them to give your case validity. If you start with a chat that moves to the phone then also have your case number ready because the person on the phone won't have access to your chat log otherwise. The person I spoke to was fantastic so I wouldn't worry about dealing with typical poor customer service like you would from other companies. The call happened 5 minutes after the scheduled time and the chat representative showed up almost immediately.

One of the first things I tried, after this issue escalated so severely on my iMac Pro that Time Machine ceased working entirely, was to reinstall macOS (since I know from past experience Apple Support will frequently recommend doing so and will be reluctant to proceed further until you've done so). Unsurprisingly that had no effect on the issue, but Apple Support at least were willing to progress once I've told them I already tried that. If anyone does get such a suggestion I'd recommend you refer the advisor to this very thread, where numerous posters have stated that doing so has no effect on the problem.

Also, given the complexity of this issue, I would recommend that as soon as you get a support advisor on the phone, you request the issue be immediately be escalated to a senior advisor. No offense to Apple support advisors (who are excellent by comparison to the rest of the industry), but this is not the kind of issue a level I tech, who is mainly helping people install printers or replacing application icons that have been inadvertently dragged out of the Dock, are likely to be able to advise on.

Given what posters on this thread have determined so far, it's almost impossible to believe restarting in Safe Mode would have an effect. Doing so generally just disables non-macOS processes, but since the culprits are almost certainly one or more of the various Spotlight-related processes which are core to macOS and would still run under Safe Mode, doing so would largely be a time-wasting exercise.

Also, creating a new user account and using that might eventually be able to reproduce the problem, but since it seems like the metadata folders need to grow to at least 50 GB or more in size to be problematic, one would likely need to create a new user account, and then create/open/edit one or more Pages files, and wait a week or more (although some people report metadata growth rates that might bring that down to just a few days) to try to reproduce the problem.

Honestly, at this point I think Apple's engineers need to focus on how Spotlight indexes Pages files, and possibly other types of data files. At least in my experience (which admittedly does not seem to be universal), the core of the problem appears to be that Spotlight indexing processes will repeatedly reindex entire Pages files over and over again, appending those results to existing metadata rather than overwriting that data.

As evidence of that, I will again point to my experience over this last weekend. I had deleted the metadata from my 27-inch iMac on January 28, at which point it was 597 GB. From the 28th until February 7th it grew from zero to about 62 GB, with no ill effects. But then after leaving a single 145 kB Pages file open (but not being edited) from Friday evening until Sunday evening on a system that was completely idle, the metadata folders ballooned to over 120 GB, nearly doubling in 48 hours.

By contrast, with no Pages files open, this system would add about two gigabytes of metadata over a weekend.

For those who have been following the entire thread, I have some new data. It doesn't solve anything, but I thought I'd share.

For me the problem was replicable on 3 different machines, with these CPUs: M2 Pro, M3, Intel i7.

A week ago I upgraded my Mac mini to an M4, and on this machine I cannot replicate the problem. I've had 3 large (for me) Pages documents open for the past 2 days, and during that time the corespotlight folder has gotten smaller. It's currently under 2 gigs. At one point while writing intensively for many hours, the folder got as large as 5 gigs. But then I left the machine alone for a few hours (with Pages documents left open) and the folder got smaller.

On my other machines I never recall the folder getting smaller if Pages docs were open.

I should add that I DID use migration assistant to set this machine up, so it seems less likely that the "fix" was avoiding a problematic setting or preference file.

This seems to be promising. Corespotlightd now at 0% while reindexing in progress .

1. Disable system integrity protection. Boot into recovery mode and access the terminal. Run csrutil disable
2. rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight (the bloated files here contain the crux of the issue)
3. sudo mdutil -a -i off
4. Remove the spotlight index. rm -rf /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight*
5. sudo mdutil -a -i on
6. sudo mdutil -E
7. Follow step 1 but instead, run csrutil enable

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.

tl;dr — cleanup of the ~/Library/Caches folder did not work; trashing the contents of ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight and ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents did work.

Folder/File Sizes Before "Fix"

• /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100 at zero bytes
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight at 66.66 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents at 9.59 GB
• ~/Library/Caches at 1.9 GB

I do not believe “Optimize Storage” is turned on

Disk Writing:

• kernel_task had written 7.32 TB
• mds_stores had written 954.75 GB
• launchd had written 535.32 GB (https://www.technewstoday.com/mds-stores-on-mac-high-cpu-usage/ recommends disabling Spotlight—which is throwing the baby out with the bathwater in my opinion)
• backupd had written 82.42 GB
• corespotlightd had written 51.61 GB

"Fix" Attempts

Feb 11 6:18 PM — trashed ~/Library/Caches

• corespotlightd remained around ≥100 % CPU for 10 minutes
• No indication this did anything to improve my situation

Feb 11 6:28 PM — trashed the contents of ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight and ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents which immediately resulted in:

• corespotlightd down to <25%
• Disk writing no longer happening constantly
• Every indication this has "fixed" my problems.

This was the 2nd time I've had to "fix" my sluggish, cursor freezing, beach-ball generating 2024 M4 Mac Mini running Sequoia 15.3. I put "fix" in quotes because this is only a temporary solution. The last time I had to implement this "fix" was 3 February, so it seems to last about a week for me. I was no longer keeping Pages documents open unless actively using them ; I think I'll go back to leaving my planner Pages document open like I used to and see how much it cuts down the time before my next "fix".

PS AshkaTheMoltenFury is an hilarious handle.

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.

Was trying to solve this issue and happened to notice the setting below. Help Apple Improve Search in the Spotlight options.

I don't have any recollection of letting Apple improve search! Disabled. And found spotlightcored dropped to effectively zero CPU!

No idea if this will remain the case. But seems worth a go if it is selected on your machine.

Was trying to solve this issue and happened to notice the setting below. Help Apple Improve Search in the Spotlight options.

I don't have any recollection of letting Apple improve search! Disabled. And found spotlightcored dropped to effectively zero CPU!

No idea if this will remain the case. But seems worth a go if it is selected on your machine.

Hmmm - okay - I'm seeing the same behaviour, but instead of with large documents (mine are sizeable, but not huge), but with _NUMBER_ of documents being accessed.

In my context, I have 8-10 documents open at any one moment (all on iCloud), and an additional 5-20 PDFs opened in Preview.

I did a reinstall of MacOS about 2 weeks ago after this problem cascaded into spontaneous crash-and-restarts even while the machine was otherwise idle (all documents closed), and I was in the midst of a lengthy video call when it decided to crash. (I also saw multiple spontaneous reboots happening overnight when the machine was otherwise idle).

Regarding re-install of MacOS, when I ran Disk Utility from Recovery Mode, it identified a ton of mismatch counts and other filesystem errors that it was unable to repair. At that point, I decided to do a nuke-and-pave, with the computer behaving itself until today when I see corespotlightd chewing CPU like candy again. (It wasn't even appearing in the list for top prior to today).

If the suspicions mentioned above are true, then this appears to be an indexing problem with the interaction between Spotlight and iCloud. (I'm reaching here, but iCloud indexing looks like a common denominator)

I am using an M4 mini with 24GB. In the past few days, I've seen corespotlightd running at somewhere around 140% CPU. At best, it drops to about 80%. And I've just checked and seen it at 38.5% - which is the lowest I've seen in days - but moments later bounced back to 132% and remained high. CPU Time 1:07:06.22 despite restarting late last night.

And have started to get beachballs. And stutters - in Pages, in Numbers, in Excel, in Firefox, moving mouse, and other apps.

I have an M1 MBP which, so far, has not suffered this. Yet I edit the same files, which are in iCloud.

Dismounting all my external drives does not help noticeably.

My Pages documents vary from trivial to substantial. And the CPU usage persists even when I quit Pages, and Numbers, and Excel, and Word, almost everything.

It had been running fantastically. That makes it extremely disappointing.

All software is, to the best of my knowledge, bang up to date - and no beta versions/releases.

Very similar to my experience.

Timing-wise, it corresponds with the release of the Apple Intelligence software (that's when I started noticing some odd behaviour). I temporarily have disabled Apple Intelligence to see if it catches up and settles down with it disabled (I'm not overly optimistic about that). At the moment I'm watching corespotlightd running up to a peak of 152% CPU, and then going gradually to a low of 18%.

Like yourself, Apple Intelligence I have an M1 MBP that is behaving just fine (but Apple Intelligence is disabled on that machine because apparently it's not available with "English - Canada" selected as a language).

About 2 weeks ago, before I did a re-install of MacOS, I ran Disk Utility from within Recovery, and it spewed a ton of index count errors - don't remember the specific text, but they were all the same, and all clearly some kind of "off-by-one" counting error.

It is marginally possible that I have a failing SSD in the machine, but that seems unlikely.