Level 2

336 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

Top-ranking reply

mphollis

Level 1

26 points

Posted on Jan 29, 2026 6:33 PM

I had this, in a major way. Activity Monitor showed greater that 100% CPU at ALL TIMES. My 2022 M2 became unusable, freezing, pinwheeling etc. Just like all these descriptions. I searched here and in other forums online, and I tried the many suggestions (short of reinstalling the system software). None of the resolutions fixed the issue. Eventually, I read one post that eluded to large Pages docs with many edits, especially those stored on iCloud Drive potentially contributing to the issue. I've been working on a 100+ page town report in Pages. It coincided with the worsening corespotlightd CPU issues, and it has had a truly enormous number of edits. While the doc isn't exactly huge (like 32 mb's?) the number of edits stored in it practically rival the number of atoms in the known universe.

So here's what I did: I created and saved a copy of this file, and also emailed a copy to myself out of caution. Then I moved the copy file (and it's associated files in it's folder) to my desktop, and I checked the "keep downloaded" option... I triple checked that my backup copy was current and working, and then I (terrifyingly) deleted the original file which was the result of hundreds of hours of work. I then restarted my Mac. I opened activity monitor and the issue is completely gone. corespotlightd is now using POINT one percent of my CPU.

My theory is that it was attempting to not just index the file itself, but also every single tiny edit I had done... perhaps as part of the "revert to" feature? Each nudge of a line or copy/paste of a section or tiny movement of an image... it was saving and indexing them all. When I made a copy, all that data was left behind. The new file has no undo's available. And voila, my Mac is working like it should again. What a relief!

Hope this helps somebody out there, because what a terrible experience it was for a while there.

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405 replies

KWiPod

Level 2

236 points

Jan 15, 2026 1:58 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Hey Mitch!

Does your other Mac open the same document that causes the issue without any problems?

Yes, I can open any of my Pages documents on my M1Max MacBook Pro from both iCloud and SSD without issue.

I can open any of my Pages documents on my M4 MacBook Air without issue too but only if they live on the internal SSD. If I open any of them from iCloud, corespotlightd beach-balling happens, most of the time. I can only stop the beach-balling by reinstalling MacOS (i.e. quitting apps, processes and restarting fail to end the beach-balling.)

Another test I'd like to see someone try in the interests of science is creating a new user account and opening the problem document in it.

When I had my M4 MacBook Air checked out by a Genius at the Apple Store last May, I was able to demonstrate the issue so the Genius reported - and escalated - the issue. The following day, an Apple representative called and connected to my MacBook Air. We created a New User account ... we created a new Pages document and saved it to iCloud and, after copying and pasting large amounts of text, the corespotlightd beach-balling unpleasantness began. This Apple rep said he would report the issue to the Pages team, and after a few days, someone higher up the support chain called, but unfortunately, on that day, corespotlightd beach-balling refused to manifest . . . which of course it did, the very next day!

PolyRod

Level 1

92 points

Jan 23, 2026 2:57 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Having had something of a respite for a while, no idea why, the issues worsened severely over the past few weeks.

Today, I changed my Spotlight settings. Switched OFF Welsh Dictionary, Google Drive, Outlook, Numbers, OneDrive, and Pages. (I think the others that are off were already off.)

Pages suddenly working like greased lightning. As it should on an M4 with plenty of memory.

I know I should have gone through them one at a time but I have little enough hair without pulling the rest...

Will have to check these settings on my M1 MBP. Which has been behaving quite well.

Jan 1, 2025 8:46 AM in response to MgS_2012

Thanks for your posts! I have large Pages files on my M2 MB Air and Apple Intelligence turned on. Editing those docs is when I first noticed the problem that eventually led me to corespotlightd high CPU usage. I’m wondering if Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence is the culprit. I talked with Apple Support yesterday (NYE) and made it to the point in troubleshooting where we identified it as a User issue and not system wide. We progressed to a system re-install, which you already know doesn’t work. I’ll talk with Support again tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’ve turned off Apple Intelligence on my Mac to see if it will also calm down

briantf

Level 1

20 points

Jan 1, 2025 10:07 PM in response to briantf

This seems to be promising. Corespotlightd now at 0% while reindexing in progress .

Disable system integrity protection. Boot into recovery mode and access the terminal. Run csrutil disable
rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight (the bloated files here contain the crux of the issue)
sudo mdutil -a -i off
Remove the spotlight index. rm -rf /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -a -i on
sudo mdutil -E
Follow step 1 but instead, run csrutil enable

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

336 points

Feb 4, 2025 9:20 AM in response to ericmurphysf

This is certainly interesting, and I also had the inkling from watching the Activity Monitor that more than one process is implicated. However I do wonder why I've been able to mitigate this issue successfully by simply deleting the spotlight plist. My system has been behaving itself for the last couple of weeks since I did this last. I don't know if anyone tried this before moving on to more drastic measures.

ericmurphysf wrote:

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:

Mar 9, 2025 9:37 PM in response to Mitch Stone

I just experienced this issue and my ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight was 50GB when I first looked, and within an hour it was 60GB in size! I just deleted that, and my caches folder and it appears to have fixed the issue. Thanks for the wonderful folk in here who identified a way to fix it for now.

Mar 16, 2025 8:27 AM in response to Daniel_145

Daniel_145 wrote:

What would you recommend, please? Reboots don't help, killing the spotlightd process in Activity Monitor helps only for a few minutes. Closing the Pages app helps but unfortunately I really need the document, it's the only reason why I didn't buy a pen and paper instead

Delete the contents of the ~/library/metadata/coresporlight/ folder. This has worked for multiple users including myself.

It's a temporary fix, in that eventually that folder will grow to the size you're seeing now. But I just see it as maintenance. Every couple of weeks I delete that data.

KWiPod

Level 2

236 points

Apr 2, 2025 12:23 AM in response to KWiPod

Since updating to MacOS Sequoia 15.4 (24E248) on Monday March 31st, all the spiking issues I described have stopped. Fingers crossed !

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

336 points

May 13, 2025 1:52 PM in response to LAWM0N

No evidence points to iCloud being implicated in this issue in any way whatsoever. Certain large Pages documents that have been extensively edited appear to be the most common trigger of this issue, and it is not dependent on them being stored locally or in the cloud. Either way, the Spotlight data is stored locally, and it is the size and/or complexity of this data that seemingly causes the process to freak out.

LAWM0N wrote:

Are you saying 'do not use iCloudDrive for Pages or Numbers?' Ever? Or just do not use past contents (after downloading past contents onto your computer, but OK to use from now on?

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

336 points

Oct 25, 2025 12:06 AM in response to dar221

I have had little to add to this discussion for a while, as this issue seemed to go away for me. Then, recently, I began working on a new Pages document. It isn't a particularly large document (around 10k words) stored in iCloud. I had been writing and editing it for several weeks, leaving it open for days at a time, without any apparent issues. Then I shared it for collaboration, with tracking changed turned on. Almost immediately after my collaborator began editing, the corespotlightd process shot up. So for me, at least, it is clearly not an iCloud issue per se. Shortly after closing the document, the process settles back down.

I also found a feature in Activity Monitor that I had not noticed before (possibly it is new in Tahoe). Double-clicking on the CPU pane brings up a window illustrating the CPU load per core. I have no idea of how to interpret this graph, or why all of the cores are labeled "Performance" except 1-4 and 13-16, which are labeled "Efficiency." In any case this is the graph from when the corespotlightd process exceeded 100%. A lot of red bars. Otherwise they are mostly green, and it seems even under this load, half of the cores are not in use at all.

Shared here in the hopes that someone will understand what this means.

Jan 7, 2025 6:07 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Hi, Mitch. After talking with Apple Support, I discovered I had a different problem. I'm a bit embarrassed about it. Router performance is basic 101 troubleshooting and I failed to speed test the router as part of looking into continued lags and spinning wheels after I had turned off Apple Intelligence (which successfully addressed corespotlightd hogging the CPU). I ran a speed test and it showed my router was running at an upload speed of 2.61, dreadfully slow, especially when working with large documents on iCloud (where all my Pages documents reside). Also, there's several discussions out there regarding how quickly we can upload documents to iCloud, which might cause delays and even spinning wheels while editing large documents, like the Pages documents I've been working with. So, I'll need to decide if I want to fork out $50 a month to increase my upload speed or just move my large Pages docs to my computer and back them up to my external drive. >>sigh<<

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

336 points

Jan 28, 2025 8:41 AM in response to ericmurphysf

Interesting. Checking these folders on my M2, I find that the size of the CoreSpotlight folder is 37GB, but no file within it is even a megabyte in size. The SpotlightKnowlegeEvents folder clocks in at 463 MB. It contains far more subfolders, so it is difficult to figure out where this data is hiding. Has your performance been improved by deleting the contents of these folders?

And another FWIW: Since the last time I deleted the Spotlight plist about a week ago, I have had no corespotlightd process issues. So I do think this is worth trying.

ericmurphysf wrote:

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.

Feb 3, 2025 4:05 PM in response to CaptainJoy

CaptainJoy wrote:

ericmurphysf asked:

How heavy a user of Pages are you?

I use Pages all the time. As a rule, I always have at least one Pages document open, and often one or more are >10 MB.

I suspect this is the root of the problem. I don't know if the amount of metadata accumulated on your system is comparable to mine, but for the last quarter of last year I was editing at least one file (on multiple Macs) that by that time had grown to ~200 MB (roughly 1,200 pages with many embedded graphics), and I'm pretty certain the result was half a terabyte of metadata saved in my user library folder. I strongly suspect a consequence of that amount of metadata was system instability, major issues with Time Machine backups, and degraded search performance in Spotlight to the point of unusability.

Since deleting this metadata last week, all three of these issues have resolved. The one remaining issue is that metadata continues to accumulate at an alarming rate, which will likely force me to remove it just as I did the last time, probably within the next two months. I'm pretty sure this is a bug somewhere in Apple's code that will need to be resolved via a future macOS update.

Feb 9, 2025 4:18 PM in response to Bets

Bets wrote:

Still concerned about just deleting the Corespotlightd file - but at least I've found it. Thanks for the discussion - I hope Apple does something about it. perhaps modify Pages somehow.

I haven't yet had occasion to delete the CoreSpotlight folder on an M-series system yet, but I've deleted all the Spotlight-related folders' contents (while leaving the folders themselves in place) on Intel systems, and have seen no ill effects.

If you want to be super-careful on an M-series system I would recommend you open the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight folder on an Apple Silicon system, and delete all the contents except for the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder. Then, when everything else has been deleted, open the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder and delete its contents.

This is probably a belt-and-suspenders approach; other users have simply deleted the entire Corespotlight folder without ill effects.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

336 points

Feb 9, 2025 4:19 PM in response to fronesis47

I don't think we know how large this folder is supposed to be, and I can attest to the fact that no process is taking over the CPU with the folder containing this much data. FWIW, I left the large Pages file open for several hours with no change in the amount of data being stored or any processes running amok, at least that I was able to witness. My issues with this process hogging the CPU seem ridiculously random. When I started this discussion, my Mac became essentially unusable within 5-10 minutes after one large Pages file was opened. Same file now, not nearly as much of a problem. All I have attempted as mitigation is trashing the spotlight plist.

fronesis47 wrote:

Mitch Stone wrote:

Earlier in this discussion it was established that iCloud is not the culprit. Files that will trigger the problem will do so whether they are stored locally or in iCloud. I meant corespotlightd because this the process I see as being hyperactive when the CPU is overloaded. Either way I have had this large Pages file open for over an hour now and the file has not grown at all. Unfortunately all of the theories we've come up with so far are incomplete or flawed. They only seem to work for some users some of the time.

I realize iCloud is not the cause per se (because the problem has been reproduced with Pages files that are not on iCloud Drive). I'm curious about exploring the possibility that the problem is worse without the optimize function on. It seems to me that with my two machines, there's just much slower growth of the folder on the machine with optimize on.

I'll also add: I'm not sure your case completely disproves the general thesis. 60Gb is a really large metadata file. It's already at the point that corespotlightd is taking over the CPU. So by this point it doesn't really matter that the folder has stopped (or significantly) slowed its growth; it's already a problem. And I guess I have to assume that the folder got that big for the same reasons as everyone else. If you could delete your folder, and then open a pages file and have the folder not grow – that would be a totally different data point.

Now that I've been deleting my metadata folder (as an experiment) I have absolutely zero issues with corespotlightd. If the corespotlight folder is smaller than 10Gb I find I never have any slowdowns at all.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues