~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents using a lot of disk space

I talked to Apple Support about this issue last night, basically to ask a single question (I'd had at least four previous support sessions with Apple on this one issue): is it safe to simply remove the files from the two folders (on Intel systems; on Apple Silicon systems the second folder is inside the first): ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight/, and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents?

The advisor said that Apple okays this approach, with the caveat that you should delete these two folders' contents, not the folders themselves.

On the two Intel Macs I was having this issue with, I deleted these two folders' contents, and saw immediate performance gains. For one thing, both systems had roughly half a terabyte of Spotlight metadata in these two folders, so I reclaimed all that storage space. For another, I saw a huge improvement in any kind of search that involves Spotlight: Finder searches, Spotlight window searches (invoked by default [CMD]-[SPACEBAR]), any searches in Mail, including smart folders; and quite a bit less processor usage by corespotlightd, which I believe is the process that writes out all this data in the first place.

That said, the problem isn't eliminated entirely. On one of these two systems, the metadata folders accumulated 8.4 GB of new data in literally a hour and a half (although it seems to have stopped growing at that point), and on the other system about 23 GB accumulated from when I removed the data last night until late this morning. But if this trick worked once, there's no reason to suppose it won't work again. So, unless the 15.3 update (or maybe some later update) addresses this issue, I'll just keep an eye on the ~/library/metadata folder, and if it grows to say 100 GB or more I'll simply delete this data again. As far as I can tell, that seems to serve no purpose other than to significantly degrade Spotlight performance. It certainly doesn't speed up searches; in fact, at about 500 GB of data, search was essentially halted in its tracks.

I have both folders you are referring to and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents is sitting at 2.3 GB and CoreSpotlight is just shy of 1GB. I would suggest to exclude the drives you do not want to index and then reindex spotlight. Not every drive needs indexing depending on your use case.

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

The combination of the additional drives to index along with the disk related apps creating more files to index is going to add to the Spotlight index. I would take a closer look at those apps as the poor write speed you are experiencing is due to those apps constantly writing files that require spotlight to index them, increasing your data graph.

It will take some troubleshooting to see if those apps are contributing to the increased index size.

• Disk Drill
• SoftRaid
• TTP

I tried multiple times deleting huge folders, located in SpotlightKnowledgeEvents. They were filling in few days. This week I checked the folder again and found around 150 journal files, some of them were a few gigabytes size, total of maybe 50 GB. I checked contents of these files and saw that most of them contained info from my emails. I have a lot of emails in my Mail app, nearly 20GB. So, I deleted huge cs_default folder one more time and disabled Mail & Messages indexing in Spotlight settings. I also added my Library/Mail folder in Spotlight's Search Privacy list. I am not sure which of these two steps helped, but currently my SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder is under 1 GB size. And it has been like this for days. I hope, it will stay like this :)

dialabrain wrote:

Sorry, Just noticed you did say you tried Safe Mode. Personally, I wouldn't touch anything in those folders without knowing exactly what the consequences are. Which I don't.

I know exactly what the consequences of deleting the contents of these folders: zero. Other than better performance, much lower CPU load by Spotlight processes, and better search results. I've deleted these folders multiple times on two different Macs, and the only real downside is that for about fifteen or twenty minutes after I've deleted them, Spotlight search results are unavailable.

I recommend deleting these folders just before you won't be using the computer for half an hour or so.

Mac Jim ID wrote:

You may be on to something with the DEVONThink 3 archiving your email. I have reviewed many of the files in the cs_default folder by opening them in TextEdit and it just reveals snippets of emails and messages, but the file sizes are small.

Since you were seeing 100GB on 4100 files, it would seem some of those files were very large. If you get a chance, try opening some of those large files you see in that folder to see if it gives you some clue on what is being indexed. Not all of the info is readable due to the Text Encoding, but you will be able to make out some of what you see there.

Just looking at the largest of the several hundred files (10-200 MB) written out so far just today in TextEdit as you suggested, I can see that essentially all of them are related to a large Pages file I'm editing (well, relatively large; it's less than 12 MB, although some other Pages files I've edited in the past have exceeded 200 MB). This comports with other posts I've read from people also having trouble with Spotlight: processor usage by corespotlightd seems to spike when editing large Pages documents (probably all iWork docs, but Pages files probably tend to be larger than say Numbers spreadsheets), especially when those files are synced via iCloud.

I noted that power consumption on my 21-inch iMac started increasing around 7:30 this morning before I'd even gotten to work (that system is my work computer). But 7:30 is about the time I started editing a Pages document on my iMac Pro at home.

My SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder was last updated on 19 Sep 2024, which coincides with the date I updated to MacOS Sequoia. I am running two Macs, one is Intel based and the other is M2 based. Both systems are configured nearly the same, same software, same mail accounts, etc.. The M2 based Mac moved the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder under the CoreSpotlight folder, while the intel base Mac has the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder (last update 19 Sep 24) in the same folder as the CoreSpotlight folder. There is a new SpotlightKnowledge folder under CoreSpotlight. I'm not sure what these changes are all about, but it is clear that the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder (directly under Metadata) was created by the previous OS and is no longer being updated, so I backed up and deleted this folder, which was taking up 47 GB for some reason. So far no issues.

esf2141 wrote:

Has anyone else had an apple tech confirm that it's okay to delete the folder?

Yes. I have done it multiple times over the past month and a half and doing so has resolved multiple problems.

I should point out that Apple's support says you should delete the folder's contents, not the folder itself, and that's what I have done. Other users have said they've been fine with deleting the folder itself, but I can't confirm that. To be on the safe side, just open the folder, select all of its contents, and then drag them to the trash.

Depending on your circumstances, the folder will eventually start growing in size again, but I've deleted its contents multiple times without any noticeable side effects.

David Talaga wrote:

I am having this problem as well.

I also suspect it has to do with email indexing on Intel machines. Unfortunately my IT dept believes that 512GB is plenty for an "advanced" machine, so that 140GB represents 27% of my drive space.

This problem needs to be fixed!

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/4f84bc06-1303-4a8f-9f2d-29439a0d1603

Go ahead and delete the contents of the CoreSpotlight and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folders. I've done it multiple times, and while it's not a permanent cure (those folders will fill right back up over a few weeks' time), it will keep your system from grinding to a halt as all available storage space is consumed.

I had the same issue. I'm using a MacBook Pro (early 2019) running macOS Sequoia 15.3.1.

Recently, my disk was filling up, and at first I thought it was due to my documents and other files.

Over the past month, even after deleting everything I could, I discovered the folder ~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents was taking up 120GB — on a 250GB drive!

My Mac was running slowly, and I was frequently running out of space during my daily work.

Thanks to ericmurphysf, I solved the problem by deleting the contents of the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder. After that, I was able to upgrade to macOS 15.4.1, and the folder structure changed.

Now, the Metadata folder only takes up 24KB, and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents is no longer there.

XRoom wrote:

Hi,

My folder "~/Library/Metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.V2/journals/11/cs_default" has 4104 files, and is consuming 100GB.

The first file is from December 11th at 10:10 p.m., and at that time the operating system was updated to version 15.2.

I am convinced that this is a problem with the Sequoia 15.2 version (24C101)

Just for comparison, in my cs_default folder I have 1300 files that consume 516MB and my first file was created September 16, which for me is specific to Mac OS 15.0. I have no files in there that were created after the 15.2 update, so for me there is no connection at all to the Sequoia 15.2 version.

Have you tried rebuilding your Spotlight Index?

I very rarely clear my Safari cookies, so I agree that is not the reason why yours would be consuming 100GB.

I have the same issue on 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro, with ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents and ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight growing in size by the day to 36GB in a month's time since upgrading to Mac OS Sequoia 15.3.

I deleted both folders (not just the contents), and re-claimed the lost disk space and now will see if it accumulates data again. Both folders are automatically re-created upon restart.

I see that some sites recommend deleting the following hidden file as well:

/System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100

References:

https://iboysoft.com/tips/macos-sequoia-spotlight-bug.html

https://www.spyhunter.com/shm/fix-macos-sequoia-spotlight-issues/

https://www.macobserver.com/tips/how-to/spotlight-using-lot-of-disk-space-mac/

Question: Is deleting .Spotlight-V100 necessary as well? Anyone has experience with deleting .Spotlight-V100?

dialabrain wrote:

Eureka. Turns out, I do have it in my iMac Pro. So must be an Intel vs Apple Silicon reason. FWIW, the folder that I do have is 1.51GBs.

Just so you guys don't feel too bad, I have two Intel Macs: a 2017 iMac Pro and a 2020 27-inch iMac. On both systems, the CoreSpotlight and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folders at ~/library/metadata/ contain a combined data of 550 and 580 GB respectively. The total number files in the latter folderol each system is something like 35,000. On both systems, these two folders comprise well over half the data in my entire respective user folders.

I also have two Apple Silicon Macs: a Mac Studio with an M1 Ultra and a MacBook Pro with an M2 Max. While they still have a lot of Spotlight metadata (the folder structure is different on Apple Silicon Macs compared to Intel Macs), it's significantly less. The former has about 8 GB of Spotlight Metadata and the latter has more like 42 GB. No idea why the two systems have such differing amounts of metadata, especially since the Mac Studio has more locally-generated data in my user folder (for what it's worth, all four Macs are synced via iCloud, and Desktop and Documents syncing is turned on for all four).

I've spoken to Apple senior advisors about this issue (also about corespotlightd using extravagant amounts of CPU time), and so far they have not recommended any fixes, other than reindexing. Which did not change the amount of files or data in either of these folders, which is perplexing. It suggests that Spotlight either does not actually reindex or that its index files are maintained elsewhere in the filesystem.

One further point: none of this data originated before the dates on which I updated these systems to Sequoia, which suggests this issue, whatever it is, originated with macOS 15.