Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

• 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.

I have 370Mbs down and 94Mbs up. Pretty sure it's not a network problem. Also, I was seeing virtually no network activity when the processes were 'stuck'. I'm now two days into updating to 15.2 (build 24C101) on my 64Gb M4 Pro Mini and the issue had not reoccurred once. FYI, I also have an 2017 Intel iMac running OS 13.7.1 on the same network and that has not had any problems with corespotlightd or processes getting stuck during this time. I'm going to attach a photo (screenshot obviously not an option at the time) of the two Terminal windows I had open to see what was going on. You can see 27 stuck processes, mostly PPID 1 so child processes of launchd which was also stuck. Here endeth my google-assisted technical expertise, I'm just adding it in case it helps someone figure out what's been going on.

First - me too - started when I updated to Sequoia 15.2.

I'm on an M1 Mac mini. The problem started with pages - which I use extensively with very large docs. I have fiber internet, and consistently get 900+ kpbs up and down.

It began with lags on my mouse and keyboard - just in pages, and spread to all apple apps, and then all apps.

Force quitting corespotlightd and restart worked for a bit. Then it came back - quicker and quicker.

Tried deleting some, then all of the spotlight activities - which worked for a bit.

Additionally tried completely turning off Siri and Apple Intelligence.

It worked for about 30 minutes. And now it's back.

Has anyone found ANYTHING that actually works?

-- update - now this process has taken over the processing suck

ericmurphysf asked:

How heavy a user of Pages are you?

I use Pages all the time. As a rule, I always have at least one Pages document open, and often one or more are >10 MB.

@sugarskyline. Yes, I'm pretty sure I didn't have this problem with Pages and spotlight before Sequoia. It's completely out of control on 15.3.

Is spotlight indexing every minor variant of the document separately? Thus each time it saves a version, that gets indexed from scratch.

I come from that far back as well!

The systems I worked on could originally be single or dual processor, later up to quad. And processor usage for a single process could almost reach 100%. With a maximum across all processes potentially approaching 400% on a quad. Which made sense.

But the precise meaning of 138% is far from obvious. Especially when we need to consider performance and efficiency cores. And how do GPU cores fit?

I’m guessing that the backup and corespotlightd were competing for the same resources (disk) and that would contribute to a spike in both processes as each would demand access to the shared resource, and then the kernel has to mediate it so neither gets completely starved.

I actually ran

nice -n20 bash -c 'while true; do killall -9 corespotlightd 2>/dev/null && sleep 2; done' &

this was actually running in the background consuming battery (at least less than corespotlightd would)

This horrid process not only is causing beachballing but is taking up ~60G in frivolous logs as well 🤬

b@Brians-MacBook-Pro-M4 CoreSpotlight % du -shc *


 28G	NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication
 
...

 27G	Priority


 56G	total

I can't add a great deal to what has been reported apart from that I do not have this issue on a Desktop running on an Intel processor, only on my MacBook Air with an M2 processor. One difference between the MacBook and the Desktop is that Apple intelligence software can't run on an Intel processor.

I did turn Apple intelligence off for an hour, restart it and after an hour the corespotlightd process has become dormant - maybe just a coincidence

I ran commands in the right order, including csrutil disable but when typing this command :

rm: /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100:

I receive this message :

Permission denied

Any idea why !?

Thanks

After installing macOS 15.2 earlier today, I cannot reproduce the issue. Apart from a single Google Chrome Helper (Renderer) process massively hogging the CPU (which did not return after a force-quit), I've gone from having 27 stuck processes with corespotlightd hogging the CPU to zero stuck processes and corespotlightd very occasionally flashing up in the top-5 of the usage list then vanishing again. No more spinning beachballs. No data entry issues. Time Machine drive reconnected and working. Fingers crossed this has fixed the issue.