Mac overheating with Pages and Spotlight; How Can I clear this?

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

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 just a couple steps I have taken:

• Deleting the /Users/myusername/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder. It may grow overlarge (>50 GB) in time. Spotlight will recreate the folder when it needs it, and probably grow it big again.

• Duplicate the old, often edited Pages files on iCloud Drive and delete those originals.

Having done this twice in about six months, it's pretty painless so I’ll now consider it as routine maintenance should the problem arise again

It has also been suggested that upgrading the Pages app to the current version will also fix the problem. I've now finally done that also and hope not to be bothered by the issue ever again. 🤞🏽

Likewise, simply quitting the Pages app seems to positively impact the situation. If you are like me and usually just leave Pages open in the background, try quitting it when you aren’t using it if these other potential solutions don't work.

Paul Downie wrote:

D.I. Johnson wrote:

And, the last couple of times? Found download all my Pages documents helped, after clearing ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight: via the terminal, last time, using ‘rm -rf’.

Which got me an ‘Operation Not Permitted’ message, when I just tried it.

What do you suggest? Clearing the folder manually, or ‘rm -r’?

What was the exact command you typed?

For what it's worth, I just tested (on a secondary, nonadmin account, just to make sure if it would make a difference)

rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight

and it worked perfectly. You may want to copy and paste the entire line above, to make sure that there is no mistype.

The first thing I'd try is to reset Spotlight. Maybe a corrupted Spotlight index is causing this.

Open System Settings->Spotligh, click "Search Privacy..." and then drag your drive icon from the Finder into the privacy list. Then quit and restart System Settings, go to the same place again, select the drive and press "-" to remove it from the privacy list. This forces Spotlight to index the drive anew. It may spike for a little as it indexes, then it should go down to nearly zero.

The most shocking thing I notice in the etrecheck report is that over 76 TB have been written in a machine that can't be more than 18 months old!

Assuming that your mini is 18 months old that equates to writing 140 GB every single day.

Of course if your Mac is younger the GB written will be proportionally higher.

Are you doing such intensive work to account for that phenomenal figure?

As I mentioned in another thread I had a situation a couple of years ago where Spotlight and its "helper" processes appeared to be writing 100 GB per day until I completely disabled Spotlight, whereupon it stopped instantly.

These were phantom writes as they never appeared physically on the disk. It seems they were being erased as they were written.

I never experienced slowdowns or high temperatures as others had done but Spotlight was the demon so I banished it to Hades . . . well I disabled it and have never looked back.

EDIT: It would take an average user at least 10 years to write 76 TB.

There are enough reports here of the same issue that I recommend using these links to report it to Apple:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Feedback - Pages - Apple

I find that, by default, Spotlight is babysitting far too many things. I reduce its workload by turning it off for locations I don't need to search. Infor here:

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

Select result categories for Spotlight

You can no longer deselect your Time Machine drive but you can deselect other externals. As many are still mechanical, they can be slower to search. For most external drives, Finder search is fast enough.

GabrielZ wrote:

Same thing here: I had a Pages document open, and spotlightknowledged.updater would be at 110% CPU load, and the Pages process would be at 70% CPU load (I was not doing anything in Pages, the document was just open).

Then, I quit Pages, and now everything is back to normal (WindowServer is usually at the top of CPU usage with around 20%).

And, let me guess: your Pages document is in iCloud?

Does the same happen with a document that is only stored locally and not syncing to a cloud service?

Same thing here: I had a Pages document open, and spotlightknowledged.updater would be at 110% CPU load, and the Pages process would be at 70% CPU load (I was not doing anything in Pages, the document was just open).

Then, I quit Pages, and now everything is back to normal (WindowServer is usually at the top of CPU usage with around 20%).

My Pages document lives in the ~/Documents folder , which is also sync'ed to iCloud.

Ian R. Brown wrote:

The most shocking thing I notice in the etrecheck report is that over 76 TB have been written in a machine that can't be more than 18 months old!

Assuming that your mini is 18 months old that equates to writing 140 GB every single day.

Of course if your Mac is younger the GB written will be proportionally higher.

Are you doing such intensive work to account for that phenomenal figure?

As I mentioned in another thread I had a situation a couple of years ago where Spotlight and its "helper" processes appeared to be writing 100 GB per day until I completely disabled Spotlight, whereupon it stopped instantly.

I never experienced slowdowns or high temperatures as others had done but Spotlight was the demon so I banished it to Hades . . . well I disabled it and have never looked back.

EDIT: It would take an average user at least 10 years to write 76 TB.

FWIW, my MBP, also from November 2024, as the OP's Mac Mini, shows about 30TB written. At the same rate, it would take far less than a decade to reach 76TB.

I understand, to some extent, your concerns, but the drives on current macs are likely to outlast the machines' useful lives. Etrechecks reports 100% health (both for the OP and me), which is good!

How does your own drive total written bytes compare now? About half? About one tenth? I am genuinely curious, I understand that Spotlight writes to the drive, but my guess is that it should not be a large percentage of all writes... other things like virtual memory and caches should write at least two orders of magnitude more...

From the report I see two things of interest

This is an often reported issue >> Pages used in combination with iCloud Sync

I do know a fellow contributor @ D. I. Johnson seems to hit on a workable solution

It is from my memory, to remove the Pages Cache files via a Terminal Command

Though as hard as I try, have not yet fold their solution

Perhaps they may appear 🤞

1 - Pages 30.86 % (Apple)

com.apple.CloudDocs.iCloudDriveFileProvider 24.82 % (Apple)

2 - I am no Hardware expert but the Write speed: 2458 MB/s Read speed: 2261 MB/s seem a bit low

To compare this M4 Mac Mini 16 GB RAM / 512 GB SSD from October 28, 2024 with the Creative Studio versions os Pages, Keynote and Number

Write speed: 3451 MB/s  Read speed: 2773 MB/s

 S.M.A.R.T. Details: 0% used, 5.62 TB written, 100% health, 2 unsafe shutdowns