Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I've been following & occasionally contributing to this thread for almost a year. I wanted to report that I have had zero spinning beachballs or corespotlightd issues since I moved all of my daily-use Pages documents out of iCloud and into Dropbox.

I'm currently running a Mini M4 pro with 64GB of RAM with Sequoia 15.7.1 and Pages 14.4. I have a side screen displaying two Console windows running 'top' commands that show the running processes (stuck ones first*), along with an Activity monitor window with the %CPU column selected. My Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder is currently 13.5GB and I haven't bothered deleting any of its contents for over six months.

My personal theory is that this issue is linked to the unlimited undos that Pages offers when images are inserted into documents, resized, text wrapped settings altered, image processed, deleted, replaced etc. I think it tries to index every change going back to the document origination. I still duplicate my daily Pages files at the start of each month in order to reduce this massive over-indexing but I'm no longer sure I need to. Why this seems to be a bigger issue when the documents are in iCloud is baffling. Not all of my theories are backed up by empirical data (in truth, hardly any are), so I'd be interested to hear if anyone else tries this and gets a positive result. I think it took a couple of days to calm down after I'd moved everything, but I'm very glad I did because this issue was driving me crazy(er). I've been an Apple fan for thirty years (Ok, the Power Mac 7100 was a nightmare) but I can't understand why this issue hasn't been sorted yet.

• I occasionally see a stuck searchpartyd process, but it doesn't seem to create any problems and it unsticks quickly

Same problem here.

Pages file on in iCloud Drive/Documents. Pages file is open. CoreSpotlight folder has grown to 60GB. Mac hangs every 10 seconds, pausing the mouse pointer and audio glitches. In Activity Monitor, Pages and corespotlightd both unusually high CPU usage, over 50%.

Quit Pages, move file to local disk. Open document. Issue doesn't happen.

macOS 26.1 (25B78)

Pages version 14.4 (7043.0.93)

Hi all,

Just recently converted from Windows and also had this issue, which is obviously unacceptable.

Working on an Air M4, sequoia 15.7, mostly with web browsers and pages.

It seems as the issue arises when Pages documents are stored in iCloud.

Tried to block spotlight entirely by a terminal command found in a forum, but that didn't do the trick.

Tried to uncheck Pages from syncing to iCloud, but didn't do the trick.

Then:

Tried to store all documents locally (in Library folder, not User folder as I suspect it to route back into iCloud(?)) - and it seems to do the trick.

Deleted the metadata folder, which before instantly reoccurred and started to grow, and now it hasn't reoccurred for a few hours, at least. And no corespotlightd process running.

Having several Pages docs open, problem seems to be solved for the moment, but will update if it doesn't last.

Just have to remember to backup my files "manually".

New information about Spotlight slowing down and glitching your computer.  I don't recommend it for anyone who regularly uses Spotlight Search but I don't - and am giving it a try to solve an ongoing issue for me and a lot of other folks.

I read a piece by Michael Simon in MacWorld that addressed the problem many of us have been having with glitches caused by Spotlight.  He claimed that he solved his same problems by toggling off items under System Settings/Spotlight.  He disabled 'Show related content' and 'Help Apple improve search'.

I have been regularly deleting large folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and this insight from Michael Simon seems to follow that same reasoning.  Again, if you regularly use Spotlight Search, you obviously want to leave at least the first item enabled.

Simon also suggested disabling System Settings/ Spotlight /results from apps for Pages.

After making these changes, my problems stopped. I am no longer regularly deleting huge folders in ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/ .

I need to correct this post! I realise that what triggered the corespotlightd spiking (and concomitant beach-balling), was that I opened a Pages document that ALWAYS causes a corespotlightd spike festival. In a previous post, I noted that the iWork team had been in touch and I had sent them that document (and the System diagnostics reports they asked for after installing their debugging logging files in System Settings > General > Device Management.)

That was back in early April 2026. I tried opening the OMG Pages document again when Pages was updated to v15.2.1 on May 8th to see if the bug I'd reported to the iWork team had been fixed and no, it had not. To stop the corespotlightd cycling (that I created by opening the OMG document), I emptied the contents of the CoreSpotlight folder stored in: MacintoshHD/users/me/Library/Metadata.

So now that I know that the general corespotlightd cycling problems were solved by MacOS 26.4 (and that I can reliably stop any corespotlightd cycling should it occur), I will try opening the OMG document again (when the next version of Pages is released) to see if they have found what causes the specific corespotlightd cycling problem in that file !

I will report back !

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.

PolyRod wrote:

And that just might correspond to my Pages issues. The documents which have always seemed to be the most sensitive to issues have significant and dense Tables of Contents.

Interesting about the Table of Contents in Pages files. I keep a daily journal which by the end of the year can run to well over a thousand pages (I'm long-winded to put it mildly). These journals have 13 ToCs: the main one with entries for each month, and then each month has a section ToC entry for each day in the month.

This issue became particularly severe towards the middle of December of last year when my Pages journal file was over a thousand pages long and had something like 350 ToC entries. The problem persisted even after I stopped editing, or even opening, this journal file and started a new one for the new year. But I think what happens is once the metadata gets to a certain size (maybe 100 GB or more), the problem starts to snowball, with increasingly large amounts of metadata being saved and corespotlightd spiking as it tries to trudge through hundreds of gigabytes of metadata.

I've had very good luck with just deleting all this metadata and letting Spotlight rebuild it. It doesn't cure the problem permanently, but so long as I don't let these folders get too large, my systems are gratifyingly free of the stalls, system crashes, and even Time Machine issues I'd been having previously.

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.

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.

ericmurphysf wrote:

Mitch Stone wrote:

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.

From what I can tell, what triggers rapid accumulation of Spotlight data specifically with large Pages documents is the way macOS automatically does versioning of such documents. That versioning is not due to sync via iCloud; it's simply the design decision of allowing the user to revert to any prior version of the doc, or indeed copying data from earlier versions to the current version if e.g. you accidentally deleted a paragraph or section of a document.

My hypothesis (so far not confirmed by Apple) is that the rapid growth of Spotlight metadata is an artifact of the various daemons doing Spotlight indexing (md_worker, etc.) reindexing the entire document, rather than just newly-edited sections. This happens whether or not you have iCloud sync turned on.

I obviously can't confirm it either (we need apple for that), but in my many hours of troubleshooting this, I am always led to the conclusion that the above hypothesis is exactly right.

I too have mentioned it happens due to Numbers. Having had lots of occurrences and problems when using Pages, I thought I had the same issue with Numbers. I made sure that neither Pages nor Numbers was running, I think I restarted, and as soon as I started using Numbers problems, started.

However, it might be limited - as in only some spreadsheets. I am doing lots of more-or-less "text database" work in Numbers - rather than calculating. Possibly in numeric/calculating Numbers sheets there isn't a problem? (Just wanted to say this so that others can check this before replying.)

I agree with Mitch Stone. I have experienced the corespotlightd overload on my Mac mini M4 OS 15.5. However, as long as I turn off Pages when I’m not using it, especially when working on a very long document, and the Mail.app as well, I’ve seen the Core Spotlight folder diminish from 30 GB to as low as 4 GB. It tends to grow again but never beyond 30 GB, at least so far. I have not turned off Apple Intelligence. Along with Mitch, I would not mess around any more with deleting Core Spotlight files and the like. My Mac runs smoothly and no longer overheats as long as I follow these precautions.

I agree - think that there is indeed an iCloud link.

In particular, I have more recently been much more careful about making sure I do not have the same documents open on both my macOS machines.

That, combined with changes I suspect fed through in updates in the past few months, has improved my actual experience. I can work on my machines without beachballs appearing repeatedly.

Nonetheless, I think the CoreSpotlight folder has grown excessively. Over 44 GB for 3646 items in my M4 mini. And about half that for twice as many document on my M1 MBP.

A pain because I keep jumping between machines - one upstairs, one downstairs. For no positive reason - I tend to just use whichever is closest when I decide to do something. But this means I have to think about things and make sure I close Pages and Numbers when I stop actively working. Otherwise I likely start again on the other machine...