How to stop Spotlight from eating memory?

Spotlight is always going to use some CPU and RAM.

To reduce that usage, you can Exclude items from the Spotlight Search.

see > Prevent Spotlight searches in specific folders or disks on Mac - Apple Support

If you have switched Spotlight off as I and den.thed instructed and there are still huge amounts being written to your drive, the problem must lie elsewhere.

It is normal for the computer to write 10 - 15 GB per day even when fairly idle or doing a bit of web surfing.

Anything above 20 GB per day is abnormal unless you are copying or downloading stuff.

Exactly how much is being written per day?

Spotlight is an important part of macOS, and if it is misbehaving in your system, probably one of two things may be happening:

1) a corrupt index

2) some third party software is causing problems, resulting in Spotlight

How exactly did you determine that "Spotlight crashed"? Spotlight is always running on the background. Did you receive an alert window? What was the error message exactly?

There have been a few posts recently where Pages and Spotlight are not playing nicely together, particularly if the Pages doc is large and in the cloud. Have a dig round the forum and see if you're in a similar position. If you are then it might be worth sending feedback to Apple.

You might take a look at another Community thread on the subject.

This issue has bedeviled some users for over a year and a half.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU over… - Apple Community

That thread has lead many to the conclusion that the problem is related to Pages and iCloud syncing.

I've experienced a similar issue and the fix for me has come down to several steps I have taken:

• Deleting the /Users/myusername/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder. It grows overlarge (90 GB) in time.

• Duplicating old, often edited Pages files on iCloud Drive and deleting the originals.

I cannot pinpoint which of these has the greatest impact as I've done them both at each incident.

Initially this calmed the corespotlightd process for six months or so until the problem eventually returned. But having done it a second time it's pretty painless so I may look at it as routine maintenance until Apple can provide a proper fix, whatever that may be.

It has also been suggested that upgrading the Pages app to the current version will also fix the problem.

Bigger picture...

• Spotlight eating memory
• Webkit using high CPU
• Want to delete files taking a few GB

Sounds like your Mac is unhappy. Short of buying a new one with more processing power and storage, you might consider backing up your Mac, then erasing and resetting it to factory settings, then restoring only the user data from the backup and reinstalling only the apps you need.

Erase your Mac - Apple Support

neuroanatomist wrote:

• Bigger picture...

Spotlight eating memory

• Webkit using high CPU

• Want to delete files taking a few GB

Sounds like your Mac is unhappy. Short of buying a new one with more processing power and storage, you might consider backing up your Mac, then erasing and resetting it to factory settings, then restoring only the user data from the backup and reinstalling only the apps you need.

Erase your Mac - Apple Support

weeklycod has made several posts, most are simply asking questions to better understand how Macs work. They indicated that this is their first Mac, that it is running well, Etrecheck shows "excellent" performance, and they have more than 40% free disk space, despite using a smaller internal drive.

Some of those posts do inquire about deleting smallish files, that at least shows an awareness of limits on free disk space, but of course detailing smallish files doesn't change the big picture there.

I don't see anything in what has been in those posts that would indicate that restoring to factory settings is warranted. Their Mac is only 8 months old. The Etrecheck report does not show anything nefarious or unusual installed.

Memory: on my Macs, "windowserver" often uses more memory than any other process, but memory pressure is always green and the computers run smoothly and responsively.

I feel that restore to factory settings is not really warranted in the case of this OP. In most instances, users simply migrate back their original setups, recreating the way things were, and for this OP, there was nothing installed (based on Etrecheck) that was a contraindication for that.