Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I have the base variant of the Apple Mac Mini with M4 SoC (16GB RAM + 256GB storage).

About three days ago, I installed macOS Tahoe 26.0 (stable). A few hours later, I received a notification that my Mac is low on storage. When I went to the desktop to check free space on Macintosh HD, I saw that it was 5GB. However, that number automatically started climbing up, and it went up to 40GB, which is what I think was available before.

After that, the PC started freezing. There was a huge delay in mouse movements and app switching, and apps were taking too much time to process a task. So, I went to Activity Monitor and noticed that corespotlightd and kernal_task were taking too much CPU power (both were at around 100%). At that point, I had six apps open actively: Chrome, Mail, Messages, Slack, WhatsApp, and Pages. Plus, there were four apps running in the background: 1Password, Paste, Plex Media Server, and Popclip.

First, I closed all the apps, but that didn't fix the problem. Second, I restarted the PC, but that didn't work either. Third, I deleted the only Pages document I had, which was 'Untitled' (saved in iCloud > Pages), but that also didn't work. Fourth, I have the base variant of the MacBook Pro with M1 SoC as well. I fired it up and found that Pages was one of the apps open in it, and it was displaying the Untitled document that I had deleted from my Mac Mini M4, and the app gave me an option to keep the document or delete it. I chose to delete it, but this didn't solve my problem either.

So, I searched about the issue and stumbled upon this thread. Before doing what people suggested in this discussion, here's what I did, and it solved the problem:

1. I opened Settings > Spotlight and went ahead with Reset Quick Keys and Delete Search History (it didn't fix the problem).
2. SOLUTION - From the top of the Spotlight settings page, I started turning off toggles one by one, including Show Related Content, all the toggles in the Results from Apps and Results from System sections, and Clipboard Search. When I did that, in Activity Monitor, corespotlightd disappeared from the top. Plus, kernal_task also stopped taking high CPU resources. With that, my PC started responding/performing normally (as fast as before).
3. Now, in Settings > Spotlight, I started turning the toggles on from the bottom of the page (from Clipboard Search to Show Related Content). Whenever I turned a toggle on, corespotlightd CPU usage went to around 16% and then came back down.
4. So, I turned all the toggles on, and fortunately, the PC was responding properly, and corespotlightd and kernal_task didn't suffer from high CPU usage. I then opened all the apps, including Pages, and my PC is responding normally (fast). It has been two hours since then, and my Mini M4 is working perfectly.

For people seeing high CPU usage for corespotlightd and kernal_task, they should try doing this. It should fix the problem. I don't know if anyone mentioned this solution before or not. I hope this helps you.

I had this trouble with Sequoia and posted what I learned by talking to Apple support some time ago. It happened again with the Tahoe update, so I repeated what worked before. In Finder, I went to ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and deleted large folders. That solved the problem. I keep reviewing those folders and deleting them when they grow over a few GB. One time while in that location, I actually saw the a few folders rapidly increasing in size as I watched. This works. I plan to repeat the process preemptively with all new OS upgrades.

What I meant was that the problems I experienced stopped. My problems were the beach ball spinning and programs momentarily stopping, then starting. That started me looking for the cause. My goal is always to have the computers run smoothly. If I keep using them and these two problem happen again, the culprit is always large folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/. After I delete the specific folders that are ~ 2 GB or larger, the beach ball spinning and momentary program stopping does not happen.

The folders so far continue to balloon. Another indicator of the issue if the amount of disk space used. This increases with the above problems and the CoreSpotlight folders increasing in size. This disk space issue is also solved by deleting the folders. The space used always drops after deleting the folders - no surprise.

I spent hours reloading the OS and speaking with several levels of Apple support up to their highest level. One tech from the highest level suggested deleting the largest folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and it was the only suggestion that worked.

My M1 MBA had this problem with the Sequoia upgrade but it isn't nearly as bad with Tahoe. I haven't had to delete folders after doing it once or twice. My M4 iMac folders still ballon.

I hope this answers your question.

Thanks for alerting us to that MacWorld article. While the author mentions using Pages, he doesn't explicitly say if his documents are stored on iCloud Drive. However, his Activity Monitor screenshot shows fileproviderd, a major red flag for us, so it’s highly likely he’s in the same boat.

I’ve reached out to Michael directly with the following:

• Clarification: Asked if he specifically uses Pages with iCloud Drive.
• Potential Fix: Suggested upgrading to Pages v15.1 (compiled for Tahoe), which seems to be the fix for most of us.
• Hardware Warning: Alerted him to the massive size of the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ folder and the severe SSD wear.
• Data Evidence: Shared my DriveDX stats showing 200TB written in 4 months meaning my SSD could reach its lifespan limit in just 6 more months at this rate.

I’ll update the thread as soon as I hear back. It’s starting to feel like Apple may owe us compensation for the significant reduction in our hardware's lifespan due to this bug.

Can everyone check their SSD health? To build a stronger case, could everyone use DriveDX (or a similar SMART utility) to post their:

1. Power-on time (months/days)
2. Total Data Units Written (TB)
3. SSD Capacity (e.g., 512GB)

I can confirm that this explanation is correct. I also have large Pages documents that are constantly being revised (books in progress), and the Spotlight files and CPU usage skyrocketed from that point on. It only resolved itself when I removed these documents from iCloud and moved them to Dropbox. The bug is related to the Pages-iCloud-Spotlight combination. And yet, it's all Apple...

Mitch Stone wrote:

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.

Just to add to Mitch's experiences: I am an inveterate journal-keeper, writing in Pages on a daily basis. It needn't be emphasized that a daily journal grows over time, and by the last couple of months of the year, my Pages journal file is typically over a thousand pages, 750k words or more, which with dozens of embedded graphics will result in a file size between 200–300 MB. Moreover, after nearly a year, we're talking literally tens of thousands of edits. When I was first researching this issue at the beginning of this year, I discovered that my Spotlight metadata had increased on two Intel systems to over 500 GB each. On both machines, Time Machine had essentially ground to a halt, Spotlight search results were useless, both systems suffered multiple kernel panics, and corespotlightd would sometimes pin all CPU cores on both systems, using as much as 1400% of CPU time spread across all sixteen cores (eight of which are virtual hyperthreading cores).

For me, deleting Corespotlight metadata resolved all of these issues. Not permanently; I have to weed out the metadata folders every week to ten days. But so long as I keep that metadata below ~50 GB (on relatively high-performance systems with lots of storage space), my computer life remains pretty peaceful. So long as I remember to quit Pages when I'm not actually using it.

But that said, I was editing my journal file last night, and with that one file open in Pages, which is about 18.5 MB, I watched Spotlight metadata grow by literally a megabyte per second or more, for as long as the file was open. In a single day that would add thousands if not tens of thousands of MB of metadata. But as soon as I quit Pages, metadata growth stopped in its tracks, and was the same value this morning before I left for work, twelve hours later.

YMMV, obviously, but for me these kinds of results could not be more dispositive of the problem here: Spotlight coupled with Pages files with many edits.

In my year-plus of dealing with this issue, I've reached the following conclusions (which may not be generalizable to other users, but they seem to at least be consistent for my particular use case):

• The problem is significantly more severe on Intel systems than on Apple Silicon systems.
• The problem, at least in my case, is strongly linked to editing large Pages files. On my two Intel systems (a 27-inch iMac and an iMac Pro), I only regularly edit large Pages files on the former. CoreSpotlight metadata accumulates rapidly, getting to 40 GB or more every few days to maybe a week at most. On the latter system where I rarely edit large Pages files, CoreSpotlight metadata has only accumulated to about 25 GB since August.
• Deleting metadata when it approaches or exceeds 40 GB (on systems with 32 GB or more RAM and 2 TB of SSD storage) seems to prevent the various Spotlight processes from consuming large amounts of CPU time and interfering with system stability/responsiveness. Since this fix works for me, I've been able to continue to edit large Pages files which are synced via iCloud without killing system responsiveness.
• On Apple Silicon systems, the amount of CoreSpotlight metadata appears to wax and wane, presumably as macOS deletes out-of-date metadata.
• On Intel systems, metadata only seems to accumulate, unless the system is restarted (after say a software update). Frequently after a restart, I have seen CoreSpotlight metadata decline from say 25 GB to <10 GB.

While this clearly doesn't work for everyone, I have found that I can maintain system stability and responsiveness by a) closing large Pages documents (and quitting Pages entirely) when not actively editing them; and b) keeping an eye on the CoreSpotlight folder in ~/Library/Metadata, and deleting the contents of the folder when it approaches or exceeds ~40 GB (a value that may be different if your system has more, or less, RAM and/or storage.

I was having this problem with my M4 Mac Mini on Tahoe 26.2. I tried clearing the caches, Spotlight metadata folder, and even reinstalling the OS. Nothing worked.

The solution in my case involved deleting an old and relatively large Pages file stored in iCloud. I had been maintaining the document for years, so it had amassed a very long version history. Because I still needed the document, I made a completely fresh Pages document (not a copy of any other document) and moved the contents of the old document to the new. I then deleted the old one, and this seems to have fixed my problem.

If you have any Pages files on which you've made many edits, I recommend copying its contents over to a fresh file and deleting the old one. It wouldn't surprise me if this is also the case with Numbers, Keynote, or any file stored in iCloud which is capable of having a long version history.

As @mphollis said in the highlighted reply, I think files with extensive version histories are the culprit. Something about all that metadata sends corespotlightd on the fritz. Apple, please solve this problem!

I switched away from Pages about 2 weeks ago. I’m using a different text editor, which has full iCloud versioning, so it’s saving versions constantly, just like Pages does. I also have its documents indexable and searchable by spotlight.

In the last week my ~/Library/Metadata folder has stayed below 1Gb, and this with intensive writing…10+ hours a day with half a dozen long documents open, all on iCloud, some also accessed from my iPad. I haven’t seen any trace of CPU spikes from the corespotlight processes.

In comparison, using Pages over the past 2 years, my Metadata folder would always immediately go above 5Gb, and would typically be at 20–50Gb by this point. (I usually deleted it when it went about 30Gb, as I would start seeing slowdowns then).

Late to the topic, but was experiencing this issue badly until a couple of minutes ago.

Symptoms very similar and persistent. Corespotlightd actually peaked at 483% a few days ago and never drops below 90%. Called apple support and got their AI helper who sent a link to my device to verify it, and as soon as I clicked it, the process went away for a day or so. Made me think it was a cloud sync issue.

Read somewhere else that it might have to do with Pages app, so I just updated it. Immediately, corespotlight changed from 180% to 0.1% and holding. Not very well versed in this deep troubleshooting, but if something that easy worked for me, it's worth a try

Back on April 7th, I noted that: 

I have a particular Pages file that will ALWAYS cause permanent SBBoD, whether it is opened from a local SSD or iCloud. [And this happens on both my M1Max MB Pro and my M4 MB Air]. I reported the issue via Feedback - Pages - Apple, and the iWork Team (still called that despite being incorporated into Creator Studio!) reached out to me. I installed  the iWork and iCloud profiles they sent me and opened the rogue file - which triggered the SBBoD superbly - saved the reports via Activity Monitor, and sent them to the iWork Team (along with the  rogue file). 

This was back in the days of Pages v15.1.1. I tried opening the guaranteed SBBoD file from iCloud with Pages v15.2 - no change - and again with v15.3 (released on June 30 2026) … and I am delighted to report that so far, SBBoD no longer happens.

Given that positive result, I have kept Activity Monitor open. Despite opening multiple massive Pages documents full of edits dating back years (and keeping them open), corespotlightd has not spiked and I have not seen the SBBoD or experienced any slowing down. [I am running MacOS Tahoe 26.5.2.]

As I have not experienced any slowing down since installing v15.3, I have not had to empty the Core Spotlight Folder [in Macintosh HD/Users/Me/Library/Metadata] or move my Pages files from iCloud to the local SSD.

Apple’s official public change log for Pages 15.3 explicitly mentions adding ‘automatic hyphenation as you type’. The hyphenation engine lives in the layer where live keystrokes hook into document processing which is where our problem manifests so I am cautiously optimistic. 

I will continue to monitor Activity Monitor and, if the current positive situation changes, I will report back!

Just to provide an update and add more context to the discussion:

I'm no longer experiencing any hiccups, mini-freezes, or beachballing. While I’m currently writing my thesis in Pages, my issue might not have been directly related to the app after all.

A few key points:

• I'm working entirely with iCloud files (Pages), and while corespotlightd still spikes occasionally, it does so as expected and without causing any slowdowns.
• kernel_task and corespotlightd are no longer consuming excessive CPU resources.

The turning point seemed to be when I deleted my 50GB ~/Library/Caches folder. After restarting, the system automatically rebuilt the Cache folder, but it has remained steady at around 600MB ever since.

Additionally, I reset my Spotlight index, first via System Settings and then using Terminal with sudo commands to wipe and rebuild it. After indexing completed (which took around an hour or so), my ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder settled at around 30GB. Despite its size, my system is now running as smoothly and responsively as I expect it to be.

I personally can't work without spotlight anymore and try to index most of the files on my system to have an extremely fast access via CMD+Space. What I'm trying to say is: although my Spotlight folder currently seems to be this big I'm not seeing any performance issues on my end.

Things too keep in mind about my situation:

• I'm not working on super big Pages files with file sizes over dozens of MBs
• I'm not using storage optimization via "Store in iCloud" in the storage settings
• I have updated from 15.2 to 15.3 with obviously very big Cache and Indexes (~/Library/Caches & ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight basically never emptied since I own this M1 MacBook from 2021 onwards)

CaptainJoy wrote:

tl;dr — trash your ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder

This has consistently been my experience. I start running into issues with Spotlight Search when this folder exceeds about 40 GB. The system runs into serious performance issues on my computers (which have 32+ GB RAM) when it gets above about 100 GB.

I'm a heavy Pages user, with 10+ MB Pages files open all the time, which seems to accelerate the growth of this folder. So once a week or so I just trash the entire folder.

It's kind of like mowing the lawn.