User profile for user: Mitch Stone
Mitch Stone Author
User level: Level 2
199 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

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User profile for user: AshkaTheMoltenFury
AshkaTheMoltenFury
User level: 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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User profile for user: ericmurphysf
ericmurphysf
User level: Level 2
172 points

Feb 26, 2025 7:47 AM in response to Zenith

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.

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User profile for user: Mitch Stone
Mitch Stone Author
User level: Level 2
199 points

Feb 26, 2025 8:20 AM in response to ericmurphysf

Lots of interesting theories on the source of this problem have been proposed since I started this discussion. I hope they are helping Apple track it down. One idea I would really like to see someone pursue is creating a new user on their Mac and using it to open a Pages file that previously caused this issue to surface. I'd perform this experiment myself, but I am not currently experiencing the issue, so I'd make a poor test case for it. Anyone willing to try this?

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User profile for user: Mitch Stone
Mitch Stone Author
User level: Level 2
199 points

Feb 26, 2025 4:22 PM in response to SBML

I am beginning to like this theory a lot. I am currently working with a Finder-duplicated version of the large Pages document that previously caused CoreSpotlightd process issues. I've left it open most of the day, editing it only lightly. During this time, I've seen the process ramp up a few times, but never go nuts and take over the CPU as it did before -- and before long, it always settles down. So rather than deleting the metadata, it seems the quicker and less disruptive solution is duplicating a Pages files that is causing CPU overloads and working with the copy. In my case I have not deleted the original, so this part of the exercise seems to be unnecessary.


SBML wrote:

That's enlightening. If you duplicate the Pages doc and delete the original then you lose the versioning options. Does that reduce the metadata?


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User profile for user: ericmurphysf
ericmurphysf
User level: Level 2
172 points

Feb 28, 2025 9:29 AM in response to Mitch Stone

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.

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User profile for user: RThomas
RThomas
User level: Level 1
0 points

Feb 28, 2025 11:06 AM in response to ericmurphysf

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.

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User profile for user: Mitch Stone
Mitch Stone Author
User level: Level 2
199 points

Feb 28, 2025 4:45 PM in response to drjz

I believe most of us are seeing this in Pages files larger than 10MB. But I from what we are hearing it seems that the size of the file (which can depend heavily on whether it includes graphics) is less the trigger than on how much it has been edited, as Pages attempts to keep track of every version. This is probably why the metadata files grow so large.


So, what I last suggested is Finder duplicating a Pages file that seems to trigger this issue. The duplicated file should not have the versioning legacy of the original. Since I started working with a copy of large (20MB+, 80k words) Pages file that caused me much grief, the problem has ceased. So now we'll see if anyone pays attention to this suggestion and tells us whether it does or doesn't work for them, too.



drjz wrote:

Could you please define large in "large Pages document"?

I had trouble with Pages files 3-6 MB. Since then, I deleted the metadata several time, narrowed Spotlight's scope, eventually to zero, turned off AI, and even switched to Word for a while. Obviously rebooted. Finally the CPU settled down. Now, I have turned Spotlight back on, turned on AI, and gone back to using Pages with the same 3+ MB files, so far no CPU problems. Magic!? (The System data is ridiculously large at 100 GB, but that is not a problem compared with the lag from an over-busy CPU.)


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Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

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