Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Bets wrote:

@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.

I think it's safe to say macOS 15.3.1 will not address this issue. According to one poster Apple's engineers have been aware of this issue since February 8 (two days ago), which is odd because I've been complaining about it since at least January 20.

I also relocated the contents of the folders named “NSFFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstAuthentication” and “Priority,” deleting files from the original folders.

After restarting I did not open Pages for a couple of hours, on checking the above folders, they had not changed in size since restarting.

I opened two documents within Pages and within 30 minutes the directories had doubled in size.  

I closed Pages and have just checked the directories again. After 12 hours, their sizes have not increased.

As somebody previously mentioned, the “store.db” file in both directories is exhibiting rapid growth but as to why, I don’t know

Thank you!! My Mac mini M1 16GB/512GB had started really lagging and I couldn't figure it out at all. A bit of googling and I found this post. The pesky corespotlight has gone from using 130%+ of my CPU, down to 0%. You are my hero. I'd never heard of that as a thing I should do, but will keep on top of it going forward. Mac now running like a dream again!

Just to increment the anecdata.

I have this problem, new MBA (M3), 1TB drive, 16GB rams.

In frustration, I both rage quit pages and deleted metadata/corespotlight folder. Problem went away. I had half dozen pages files open, all <3MB, nothing but text. I launched pages with one file, 6000 word outline. Everything awesome for about 14 hours. Then corespotlight up and running nonstop for like 4-5 hours. Rage-quit pages again. A flurry of activity, then cpu died down, corespotlightd not in the top 20 in activity monitor.

Sent feedback via assistant to Apple, reported here. Problem does seem pages related, which is sad, because I was growing very familiar with and fond of pages over Word. Apple! Please Fix!

rage-quit means right clicking dock icon->quit while cursing loudly.

Zenith wrote:

Next stop on the troubleshooting train: exclude ~/Library/Metadata from spotlight. Why would we need spotlight to index that anyway for routine operation?

I think you're right about what is causing Spotlight metadata to balloon (and have been discussing the matter with Apple support for over a month; currently I'm waiting for a response from engineering).

That said, I tried your troubleshooting step noted above, with negative results: Spotlight metadata continued to grow, and much more quickly if Pages is running with a document open. The only "fix" for this issue I've found to work so far is to regularly delete Spotlight metadata out of the ~/library folder. I'm a pretty heavy user of Pages, so I have to do this about every ten days, by which time metadata has usually exceeded 60 GB.

Mitch Stone wrote:

The inconsistency of this problem from day to day and Mac to Mac is crazy. I am presently not experiencing it on my M2 Ultra Studio. I never experienced it on my M1 MBA, even when opening the same Pages file on it as on the Studio. All this said, I am not convinced that preference files are not implicated, because the OS writes to some them, including the spotlight plist file. I suppose if this bug was a simple one Apple would have fixed it already.

The most bizarre thing that has happened to me so far in this whole misadventure was that before I determined that it was permissible to delete CoreSpotlight metadata without e.g. ending up with an un-bootable system, I was contending with multiple Time Machine issues, kernel panics, temporary system lockups (especially during video playback), and corespotlightd pinning the CPUs on my M1 Ultra Mac Studio (pinning the CPUs on a system like that is no easy task). Okay, that's what many people on this thread have reported. But here's where it gets weird:

I have never deleted Spotlight metadata on this system. That metadata has never exceeded about 40 GB, which in my months-long experience is not generally enough to precipitate these kinds of issues, at least, not on any of the Macs I own. But, after I deleted enormous quantities (> 500 GB) of Spotlight metadata on two other Macs (my iMac Pro and my 27-inch iMac), the problems I was experiencing on my Mac Studio literally disappeared, never (or at least not yet, a month later) to reappear.

I cannot account for why this would be, other than that all three systems (and my MBP) are all on the same iCloud account, and all four have iCloud sync turned on for, among other things, Pages.

Is this just a lucky coincidence? I'm leaning in that direction. But the timing is certainly suggestive of, well…something.

An update on my status. Similar problems to everyone else. I too have large pages files, several machines, and iCloud file storage and sync. Deleted spotlight metadata a few times. Helped for a while, then the problems returned -- large metadata folders, high CPU load, and that weird rhythmic spiking of the CPU usage.

This week, the mouse (old Logitech with usb dongle for bluetooth) lag was significant across several apps, beginning with pages. Thought my mouse batteries were the problem. Changed batteries. Didn't work. Changed mice - went through all 3 of my usb dongle-bluetooth Logitech mice, and then switched to my bluetooth only laptop mouse. The problems went away.

Got new bluetooth only mice, and also dumped the metadata again. CPU load has been low and steady, Corespotlight metadata folders have stayed under 10 GB for a week!

Yet another weird data point.

Tried playing around with a Microsoft Word file that was an exported Pages doc and even though the system is seemingly calm at rest, if I was to make the smallest edit possible (literally just pressing space bar) the response is actually somehow much worse than if it were just a normal Pages file. There is also a new issue of the read amount being absurdly high alongside the high write speed (when editing a Word doc). The response I get from a Pages file is more gradual and irrespective of what I do, the response I get from the Word doc is 100% reactive. Each and every edit no matter how small or simple will trigger a massive CPU and disk spike. If I do nothing it goes back to normal, however the disk read will continue to be elevated for around 8-10 seconds. This is a file that isn't even in the iCloud Pages folder, it's completely offline.

Additionally, losing hope at this point that this whole issue will be fixed in the next update but of course I don't know for sure. This app was an amazing switch and I did get several months of use out of it before this issue arose but I still wish I was able to go through all the phases of my project before this happened. I was willing to eat the disk write damage to the SSD cause at least I could pretend like it's not happening but the CPU spikes so high that it makes the fans kick and it's legitimately not something I can work around.

If for whatever reason you simply need to be able to read/present your document with all comments and chapters intact, export to Word. PDF allows comments but not as intuitively. I'm actually shocked how much information is perfectly retained in the Word doc.

Absolutely happening to me-- corespotlightd spilking CPU and system glitching

on brand-new MacBook Pro Apple M4 Pro running 15.3.1

started about 4 weeks after I migrated over. all problem solving failed. reset to factory settings- and no migration. same issue presented. brought back to apple- they did firmware reinstall and set back to factory settings. can now confirm this continues to happen when and only when I am running pages- generally my pages docs are re-edit of forms with numerous past editions. I quit pages and glitching and CPU spikes go away

I already tried all the listed suggestions. And the issue seemingly does not manifest consistently for everyone. I know there's been a primary focus on system folders but that was always the lesser of my problems. The spikes I see aren't ignorable, they bump CPU usage up to a consistent 40%+ on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro unless I close the app. There is no way the app can be seen as usable when it's single handedly taking up nearly half the CPU power. Battery drainage is also significant as within minutes it's as high as if I was using video editing software. I would've ignored everything else if it meant I could get back to using this app cause I have things that need to get done at the end of the day and I'd much prefer to use this app as the primary choice but the impact on my machine beyond the SSD writes and deletable folders is way too much. Activity Monitor isn't why I can't ignore it, it's how I get met with immutable fan noise and system slowdown. These are also issues I have always had bundled together rather than it being something that appeared later after the system folder issues.

Also, in response to LAWM0N, I was using a Word doc in the Pages app, rather than using the Word app (I don't own it).