Level 2

208 points

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I am wondering if anyone has discovered any new ideas for stopping the corespotlightd process from hogging the CPU. According to Activity Monitor, the corespotlightd process often occupies more than 100% of the CPU load, sometimes spiking as high as 400% on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio. This problem has become so severe that it often pinwheels under normally non-intensive tasks. It can cause the video to flicker on my Studio Display. In one case it caused my Mac to kernel panic (crash).

I encountered this bug only after installing Sequoia 15.2, but having researched this issue extensively, I find that Mac users have identified it since at least macOS Ventura. So here are some solutions we don't need to hear again:

Reindexing Spotlight by adding and removing volumes in Spotlight Privacy. This provides relief only temporarily. Within hours the process is again grinding the Mac to a halt.

Killing the corespotlightd in Activity Monitor. Again, this is at best only a temporary solution as the process will reinstate itself.

A "clean" install of macOS. First of all, no such process really exists. The OS recovery process simply reinstalls a new copy of the System files. Nobody reports this as a fix. An internal drive wipe and reformat, and restore from Time Machine is also unlikely to help, as it simply returns your Mac to its previous state. If the corespotlightd problem results from a corrupted file, the problem will likely simply be recreated in your reinstall. "Nuke and pave" might solve the problem if it caused by a format or directory issue on your startup volume. This does not seem to be the case, but if anyone has permanently cured the problem by this method, please report it.

What we do need to hear is from anyone who has spent time with Apple Support on this issue and been provided with solutions that actually work, or has new ideas about what causes it. Feels like we're on our own here, since Apple seems to be stumped.

Posted on Dec 19, 2024 11:21 AM

Top-ranking reply

AshkaTheMoltenFury

Level 1

44 points

Posted on Feb 8, 2025 2:10 AM

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.

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Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

208 points

Mar 6, 2025 3:40 PM in response to LAWM0N

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.

BTW, I have also sometimes seen beachballs in Contacts. I always attributed this to iCloud synching issues, but maybe this isn't the real cause.

LAWM0N wrote:

• I keep activity monitor open and handy all the time. Glad I have two large screens.

• Copying large page document to remove metadata has been helpful bandage, but no fix.

• I have not noticed spikes in Word (because I don't use it much and was not paying attention to Word). My Metadata accelerated its increase one day, and that might have been related to opening Word document. Not sure. I'll watch.

• I have noticed spikes, slow CPU when I make any changes in Apple Contacts, which is huge problem, because I use Apple Contacts often.

Mar 7, 2025 1:36 AM in response to fronesis47

How do you delete meta data folders? I'm really not tech savy, but I'm experiencing the same issues as other are talking about. I'm writing a thesis and when I open the pages document, which is very large, my computer starts to have intermittent lags and cursor freezes.

I would like to use a work around for now, until apple figures out a solution.

Jan 1, 2025 6:11 AM in response to Mitch Stone

i have an issue with my iMessage

MgS_2012

Level 1

38 points

Jan 1, 2025 8:59 AM in response to Rollwagen

My experience was that it took about 24 hours for corespotlightd to settle down to normal levels of activity.

Jan 1, 2025 9:09 AM in response to MgS_2012

I'll be patient

Jan 1, 2025 5:39 PM in response to Mitch Stone

I checked Activity Monitor on my M2 MBA 8 hours after turning off Apple Intelligence and the CPU usage for corespotlightd was 0.0% !

SBML

Level 1

42 points

Jan 1, 2025 9:01 PM in response to SBML

Addendum. I do not have access to Apple Intelligence.

briantf

Level 1

20 points

Jan 7, 2025 11:10 AM in response to frédéric pinardon

May need “sudo rm ..”

Feb 6, 2025 2:02 PM in response to Mitch Stone

J'ai eu le même problème et après avoir désactivé apple intelligence (temps d'écran - contenu et confidentialité - Intelligence et Siri - tout désactiver) le problème est résolu pour le moment !!!