Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

fronesis47 wrote:

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.

Replying to my own post to amend it: It looks to me like the temporary fix is NOT a fix at all. I just turned spotlight indexing OFF, then opened a pages file and watched the corespotlight metadata folder grow over 5Gb in less than an hour. Whatever process is writing to the metadata folder is not turned off when you turn off spotlight indexing.

This means the only options are to live with this, by occasionally deleting the metadata folders, deleting the .plist file, and perhaps turning indexing off and on – all while waiting and hoping that apple fixes the problem.

I agree with Mitch Stone: it would be good to know if other documents (such as Numbers files) cause the same problem, and to see what happens with a new user.

THANK YOU to sugarskyline for showing me how to change the default presentation of the message board.

Bets wrote:

Thank you for this clear summary. I have developed this problem. I AM using large Pages files. The problem developed after one of the fairly recent system updates. I'm on an M2 Air 8 mb memory running 15.3. I am a heavy but ordinary user who is NOT comfortable deleting random files or using Terminal. Can you give us some simple instructions until APPLE fixes this problem. As the computer is quite Unusable at this point. It also has started crashing with the same error (can't recall - but something about devices not loading upon reboot).

To empty the Caches Folder:

Tab to Finder and in the Finder menu go to Go>Connect To Folder… and copy/paste „~/Library/Caches“. The Caches folder will pop up. Delete its contents. It’s generally safe.

To „reset“ or rebuild the Spotlight metadata (also called reindexing):

Either via the System Settings as explained by Apple here:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

OR

1) Open the Terminal app.

2) Check if spotlight is running:

mdutil -s /

3) Turn off indexing (spotlight will stopp adding data when for example new files are being created):

sudo mdutil -i off /

4) Erase existing metadata (spotlight metadata will get wiped meaning the spotlight index will be erased):

sudo mdutil -E /

5) Turn on indexing back on:

sudo mdutil -i on /

After turning the indexing back on you will notice the index is being rebuild when you initiate spotlight with CMD+Space. It even shows you a blue progress bar.

In Short:

The system will automatically start reindexing afterwards unless indexing is disabled because you didn’t reenable it again by skipping Step 5) ( sudo mdutil -i on / )

At this point a restart never hurts. After that let it rebuild. Hopefully it gets smoother now. 😬

Mini notes:

1. If you disable indexing (-i off), Spotlight will not reindex after erasing.
2. If you have a large drive, reindexing may take several hours and impact performance. I have a 1TB drive with 15% space left. It took around 45-60 minutes.

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.

PolyRod wrote:

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

I'm pretty sure this is what's happening. The data structures in the ~/library/metadata Spotlight folders are very different between Intel and Apple Silicon systems, but on the former, I can open up a large .journal file in the /SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder, say a 120 MB file, and find tens of thousands of references to the same Pages document that might only be 10 MB in size. This suggests to me that with every change in a Pages document that is saved in its version history (which might be every paragraph, or even every sentence), Spotlight re-indexes the entire document from beginning to end.

My 2024 M4 Mac Mini was unusable: spinning beachballs, screen locking up for a few seconds. I tried several things—force quitting the corespotlightd process, Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac, turning off Apple Intelligence, deselecting all categories from Spotlight search—none of this worked.

I can confirm, that as instructed by ericmurphysf above, when I deleted the metadata out of the ~/library/metadata/Corespotlight and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (while leaving the folders themselves intact), I was rewarded with near-immediate improvement. Hopefully this holds up.

I'm wondering why I was affected and others not? One unusual thing about me is that I was upgrading from a 2014 Mac Mini. Maybe the jump from Monterey (OS 12) to Sequoia (OS 15) when migrating my old stuff over via Time Machine had something to do with it?

Mitch Stone wrote:

Did you try my suggestion? For me, it actually did help a lot. I'm not sure I understand the resistance to it, given the simplicity and apparent effectiveness. I'd really like to know if it works as well for others as it did for me.

Based on the totality of posts on this thread, it seems very likely that while using Pages is not the sole cause of corespotlightd (and Spotlight metadata) running amok, it seems to be possibly the largest contributor. So far, users seem to have had decent luck with one, two, or all three of the following:

1. Mitch's recommendation of duplicating a Pages file (thus removing versioning information, which seems to be what spikes corespotlightd activity and Spotlight metadata accumulation), and then making further edits to the duplicated version.
2. Removing Spotlight-related .plists.
3. Removing Corespotlight metadata from the ~/library/metadata folder(s)

None of these workarounds are permanent fixes. But they seem to buy at least temporary reprieve (I deleted Spotlight metadata yesterday afternoon, and right now the system fan is at 12%, system CPU usage is below 20%, and corespotlightd doesn't even appear in the top forty processes). If I have to delete metadata once a week or so (a task that takes all of ten seconds), that's a small price to pay for acceptable performance.

If you're running into performance issues, including Time Machine issues, I would recommend you try some or all of these fixes. Apple may or may not ever get around to addressing these issues (which seem to disproportionately affect Intel systems which are obviously not Apple's priorities these days). But these fixes, singly or in some combination, seem to work for a lot of people. I'd at least give them a try. None of them seem to have negative consequences, unless you're unusually dependent on versioning in Pages.

I'm not sure how many other people with this issue have seen degraded Spotlight results (including in Mail) as a result of corespotlightd's misbehavior, but I managed to at least temporarily resolve some of these issues by, on the advise (or at least consent) of Apple support, deleting the contents of the two folders, CoreSpotlight and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents, from ~/library/metadata/.

Note that I deleted the contents of these two folders, not the folders themselves. Also note that on Apple Silicon systems the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder is inside the CoreSpotlight folder. On Intel systems, it's at the root of ~/library metadata.

However, deleting the contents of these folders (on my system those contents comprised over half a terabyte of data) did not permanently resolve the issue. In barely twelve hours Spotlight added 22 GB of new metadata to these two folders. But I think until Apple resolves this issue (I doubt it will be in 15.3), simply deleting the contents of these folders when they get over a couple of hundred GB will definitely improve system performance, especially search.

Also note that in my experience these issues are less serious on Apple Silicon Macs. On my M2 Max MBP and my M1 Ultra Mac Studio, these folders are large but not enormous; 40 GB on the first system and 18GB on the second one.

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).

Unfortunately for me none of the notable "fixes" listed in this thread have worked much for me. Multiple system processes in general are out of wack with this update, which I feel are related, and the only actual thing that works in keeping my SSD at any level of "normal" is not having Pages open at all. My document isn't nearly as large as what has been listed here, mine is only 1.3MB; a couple hundred pages with zero images and some hyperlinks, and yet opening it, even if I don't do anything with it, will spike disk reads up to ridiculous levels and cause the CPU to rise high enough to make the fans kick. If I were to make any edits, even just a few letters, disk write will multiply several times over compared to the idle. Feel pretty defeated on this especially since without this issue I'd otherwise be loving my new Mac that I just spent thousands on, and especially since this feels like one of those things Apple will never acknowledge.

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.

Thank you for this. I tried it and things were actually looking promising. After 25 minutes though I decided to make an edit on my 1.3MB Pages document just to see if it would continue behaving, and unfortunately it did not. After about a minute CPU usage spiked greatly and the disk began writing immense amounts again. When the document wasn't touched at all however after opening, the system behaved (like 99% so). Definitely the most effective thing listed so far but unfortunately it still goes downhill after the first edit.

fronesis47 wrote:

Unfortunately, I think that apple's default to "sort by rank" means that many people are MISSING the most important discoveries in this thread.

For anyone unaware, you can actually go to your profile, click Edit Profile & Preferences, scroll down, and change the default sorting option.

I'm chiming in to document very similar issues and use-case scenarios. Lots of Pages docs open through iCloud storage (grad school student). I started noticing the slow down occurrences in the fast 2 weeks, with growing regularity. I've been running 15.3 for most of that time I believe. The effects show up across every app. The most drastic occurrences seem to be in my Notes app. I've got tons of notes, a few collaborative, some small, some large. I often get a slow down while typing in notes, and regularly have the app freeze on me and require a forced quit of the Notes. Pages has had those slow blips, but never a full freeze and force quit.

I've disabled Apple Intelligence, and switched off the option of sharing Spotlight data with Apple. It seems that has kept the identical "corespotlightd" process from overloading my system constantly, although I am watching Activity Monitor spike with "corespotlightd" over 100% once in a while.