Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

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

I haven't had a problem since 11 February, when I was running macOS Sequoia 15.3. Then today, I noticed a lag when typing into a Pages document and then a spinning beachball when poking around in a Finder window. I fired up the Activity Monitor; corespotlightd was back to it's old tricks.

macOS Sequoia 15.4.1

Folder/File Sizes:

• /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100 does NOT exist
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight at 62.45 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents at 7.4 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication folder at 27.92 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/Priority folder at 26.79 GB
• ~/Library/Caches at 1.85 GB

I do not believe “Optimize Storage” is turned on

Disk Writing:

• kernel_task had written 4.96 TB
• mds_stores had written 3.10 GB
• launchd had written 440.20 GB
• backupd had written 25.19 GB
• corespotlightd had written 47.46 GB

Steps to Fix (which is only temporary but not onerous)

12:59 PM —

• corespotlightd using >300% CPU
• Pages using 23.1% CPU with two small files open
• “Data written/sec” was typically sitting at around 180 MB

1:02 PM — trashed the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder

1:04 PM — 

• corespotlightd down to 2.5%
• Pages down to <10%
• “Data written/sec” is typically staying <1 MB

1:22 PM — com.apple.podcast.SpotlightIndexExtension at 99.6% CPU

1:44 PM — at some point before this time, com.apple.podcast.SpotlightIndexExtension at 0% CPU

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this listing, as it would have been impossible to resolve my sequoia/spotlight issue without all of your help. There appear to be two simple actions to eliminate the runaway spotlightd process.

• • Empty the contents of the ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder
  • Download the contents of the "pages" and "numbers" folders on iCloudDrive onto your computer

NOTE: It has only been two hours since the problem was resolved, but I am confident that it is gone.

I hope you find this useful.

Mitch Stone wrote:

The wide variation of experience with this bug is vexing.

To put it mildly. In my case (which seems to be similar to some people's experiences and wildly dissimilar to others'), I can avoid issues with CPU overload and a host of other problems, including Spotlight search, smart folders in Apple Mail, Time Machine, just to list a few, by the simple expedient of emptying the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight folder on a regular basis (at least on Intel systems; the two Apple Silicon systems I own seem to do their own trash collection, as it were).

But "regular" has seemed to become a shorter and shorter period of late. Example: I emptied the above folder around eight o'clock this morning on my iMac Pro, before going to work. It had been just short of 40 GB before I emptied it. I happened to stop home about two and a half hours later, and the folder had already grown to nearly 30 GB. That's with no iWork apps open at all: not Pages, not Numbers, not Keynote. Which you would think would falsify my own hypothesis about how heavily-edited Pages files, at least, contribute to exacerbating if not actually causing the problem.

And across the room, I've had a large (>55 MB), heavily-edited Pages file open for two days straight on my Mac Studio (while it was also being edited on other systems). At the beginning of that period, CoreSpotlight was at about 27 GB. But after a day, it was down to 9.7 GB (apparently some process is doing what it is likely supposed to do, which is to delete out-of-date metadata). In the day since then, it's grown all the way to 9.72 GB.

If nothing else, these observations support the contention that this issue is much more severe on Intel systems than on Apple Silicon systems. But others with M-series Macs have problems as or more severe than what I experience on my Intel systems, so…who knows?

It would be nice if Apple could ultimately resolve this issue, but given how exasperatingly difficult it has been to even diagnose what reliably causes the problem, I'm not optimistic.

[I have iMac 27-in Retina 5K display. 3.8GHz, 8-core, 10th gen, Intel Core i7]

Two points that work for me.  NB: This CPU overload issue seems individualized for different folks/devices.

1. Delete Metadata – I am conservative about what I delete, because I don't know what I'm doing.  I delete only the files which seem to accumulate large data in Metadata.  [Highlite file/folder >Right click > "Info"].  I find only two folders with large data:  CoreSpotlight and one of its larger sub-files SpotlightKnowledgeEvents.  Other files seem negligible in size, and I can ignore them.  They don't seem to change much, ever, or at all.

I highlight and delete the contents of CoreSpotlight all the way "down" to SpotlightKnowledgeEvents.  Then, I delete the contents of SpotlightKnowledgeEvents. Those two folder contain all the accumulated data under Metadata that causes issues.

When I go to my Metadata folder*, I open Metadata folder and find other files and folders (number depends on time lapsed since last delete). Finder > Go > Press "Option" to reveal secret folder "Library" > Metadata >

2. "Duplicate" problematic large Pages files. – This seems to eliminate metadata on the duplicated file, and it's only the large Pages files that seem problematic.  I have one very large file that I work with often.  If I duplicate as needed, my CPU overload issues are not an issue.

I can go days and days with no growth in metadata.  The issue seems resolved… until it's not.  Issue seems revived when I open a new large Pages file, which I've not duplicated.  So, I duplicate that file, and issue goes away.

I rename the duplicated file ending with the date copied, so I can track that.  I send the old file to trash. 

I don't like having to do any of the above, but it seems to work for me, eliminating CPU overload issues.  I'm hoping Apple some day makes the software fix for this issue, because it's very frustrating.  I hope this group can pressure Apple.  If/when I have sufficient time/energy, I will go on social media and creatively whine so loud, Apple might wish they have fixed this issue.  Until then, the above bandage works.

I also check in System Settings (Apple logo top right > System Settings > Storage, which opens "System Data" at bottom.  I get a larger figure, like 132.78 GB, which changes after a 1/2 minute to a smaller figure, like 102.34 GB.  This provides less detailed info, but it's a good match with "Library" folder, and I find it satisfying, when I delete Metadata files and folders, to watch Trash line appear, and then disappear when I empty trash.  I track that daily, so I can note when/whether the Metadata folder are large enough to need deletion.

It was my issue, thank for pointing out the iCloud dependence of this issue. I moved the problematic file out of iCloud and now everything is back to normal. corespotlightd was creating 30 Gb of data per week!

While I had thought the issue has reduced, and I was not getting the problem nearly so much, over the past couple of weeks it has been terrible.

Copying, then deleting the biggest problem file, and renaming back to original name, seems to make a huge difference. Which strongly suggests some versioning issue is behind much of the problem.

My big problem file is edited most days, sometimes only a few characters, sometimes more extensively. It has a Table of Contents which (obviously) updates - and I'm wondering if that is part of the problem. At least every time a ToC entry changes, or any pagination, the ToC has to update. After a few minutes of editing, it might well plough its way through multiple ToC versions.

A process exceeding 100% is not a problem, mainly because we have multi-core machines and so it won't kill performance generally - in fact, it just indicates you're using your machine as it is designed.

The real problem is when it is stuck there - at very high levels, and then you may start to see the beach ball or have hangs because something else needs to do something and can't.

Another good indicator is file read/write access stats - and that is also one that is surely impacting us with this as well.

The problem is not solved when we delete the huge spotlight caches or indexes, it is just improved temporarily. It will happen again with Pages and iCloud.

I have not experienced the problem since I moved my documents out of iCloud - but that does not mean it is fixed. What I expect is just that it will take the issue longer to surface. I think having docs in iCloud exacerbates the problem, maybe because there is more for Spotlight to index because of the iCloud syncing?

I did set up a script to copy my files up to an iCloud folder every night, but I only ever do the main editing in the local file structure.

This is not a fix. This is a tacky workaround.

I pay for iCloud, I bought a Mac, Mac OS has Spotlight and Pages. I want to be able to use the things that I bought and paid for.

"Turn off spotlight" or "don't use iCloud" are not reasonable answers. Apple needs to fix this.

But also - the problem never existed until fairly recently, so *something* they introduced in Tahoe, Pages, iCloud, or Spotlight - created the problem.

Was trying to solve this issue and happened to notice the setting below. Help Apple Improve Search in the Spotlight options.

I don't have any recollection of letting Apple improve search! Disabled. And found spotlightcored dropped to effectively zero CPU!

No idea if this will remain the case. But seems worth a go if it is selected on your machine.

Turning off Apple Intelligence on my M2 MBA macOS 15.2 stopped corespotlightd from hogging the CPU, dropping the process from in excess of 250% of CPU to 0.0 % within 8 hours. However, when I went back into my Pages doc (currently 1.2 MB, stored on iCloud), I continued to experience the spinning rainbow wheel, although less frequently and for less time. I've also experienced hesitation in my other apps (including while typing this post!), but no spinning wheel. I've talked with a member of the Senior Support Team at Apple and have arranged for them to collect data for Engineering to evaluate. That happens this coming Tuesday (my schedule doesn't fit with theirs until then). As much as we all don't like it, it appears it's a problem we'll have to live with for a bit until Engineering can figure out what's happening

Hi Mitch. I always assumed the issue was related to Pages. But this latest spike persisted for hours even with all apps closed and my SSD and iCloud removed from indexing. [ChatGPT suggested that a corespotlightd spike of >200% (which is happening as I type this accompanied by the SBBoD!) is likely is an indexing loop or bad database, and advised deleting the index in Terminal with sudo mdutil -E /. 

I did this and nothing changed!

So, it’s now 4 hours later . . .  during that time, I reinstalled Sequoia and after logging back in, corespotlightd did its spiky thing for around 15 mins and now, finally, all is back to normal. Activity Monitor is reporting that 97% of CPU is free and just a few Efficiency Cores are ticking over as I write this in the Notes app. Such bliss: this M4 MacBook Air is such a spectacular machine . . . when it functions normally.

I have not yet opened Pages: before I dare to do that (and risk turning my Mac’s performance back into the MacPlus I owned in 1986), I have placed all the Pages documents upon which I am currently working in a folder called ‘In Progress’ on the Desktop. Using the System Settings Search Privacy tool, I have excluded this folder from Spotlight’s purview (I hope!)

If I need to open any other Pages documents as I work, I will add them to this In Progress folder before I risk opening them!

I will update this post and let folk know if it’s a strategy that works … when I open Pages and start work in the next hour.

BYW, I have reported this corespotlightd problem via Apple’s Feedback web pages for Mac OS and for Pages. Back in 2013, I did the same thing for a process called mdworker (which was also Pages related, in fact it was caused by ONE single Pages document that was full of graphics, originally created in ClarisWorks, whose documents could be imported into Pages.) I was contacted by Apple (by email) and the Pages team asked me to send the Pages file and install a profile on my Mac. I did both, sent Apple the profile file . . . and the next OS update [or it may have been Pages update, I don’t recall] solved the issue. 

That was a pretty niche issue, and yet the Pages Team reached out to me. The current issue is far less niche as it seems to affect anyone who uses Pages. Wouldn’t it be superb, if Apple reached out to one of us for this latest Pages/corespotlightd crisis!

There seem to be some new followers of this thread.

Again, my very simple and working solution is to work on Pages document saved in non-iCloud folders (Downloads for example).

Then, when you are done, you can copy the document in Documents folder or similar.

When you have to edit, do the reverse: copy in Downloads, open that document, save, and then copy back into Documents.

Dear community, Sorry 4 my English language. I had lots of problems with corespotlightd. I tried a lot of your solutions. Nothing was successful. And then I pressed the bottom at spotlight in Systeeminstellingen: "delete history" / 'Wis geschiedenis". Problem solved. All day long up to now. RSVP, Hans de Bruin.