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

For the past couple of days, I’ve been getting more over heating when using Pages alongside Safari and TextEdit

It usually starts when Pages is active.

And — going by Activity Monitor — the corespotlightd process is hogging resources: as does spotlightknowledged.updater.

There IS a method know to help: clearing the caches in a given folder.

Can someone remind me how to do this manually, please, as the Terminal command given in other, similar answers, doesn’t seem to work for me. (It gives me a ‘Not Permitted’) message.

EtreCheckPro Report.log

Mac mini, macOS 26.5

Posted on Jun 11, 2026 12:19 AM

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D.I. Johnson

Level 8

44,675 points

Posted on Jun 11, 2026 7:17 AM

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.

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Paul Downie Author

Level 1

81 points

Jun 11, 2026 9:41 AM in response to Luis Sequeira1

Luis Sequeira1 wrote:

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.

All of the past few times, I’ve EITHER ‘rm -rf /Users/UserName/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/’ OR used ‘~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/’

With and without the final slash

I’ve also copied the command given: just in case I HAVE got it wrong.

I’ve got ‘Operation Not Permitted’.

What do I manually remove from that folder? It looks like that’s going to be the only way of doing it.

Jun 16, 2026 4:26 AM in response to Paul Downie

I encountered a similar issue where Spotlight was going ballistic with excessive disk writes to the tune of 100-140 GB per day. However, disk space was not being consumed. It seemed Spotlight processes were were writing to some temp file then deleting it over and over.

Though a long painstaking process by disabling drive indexing by Spotlight and then slowly narrowing it down by folders and found that a particular folder was causing Spotlight to go ballistic. Monitoring that folder found that zero changes were being made to that folder but for some reason Spotlight was being triggered by it.

Then a macOS update came along and the issue went away. Never drilled down into that folder to find the trigger(s) after that.

Paul Downie Author

Level 1

81 points

Jun 16, 2026 5:18 AM in response to woodmeister50

woodmeister50 wrote:

I encountered a similar issue where Spotlight was going ballistic with excessive disk writes to the tune of 100-140 GB per day. However, disk space was not being consumed. It seemed Spotlight processes were were writing to some temp file then deleting it over and over.

Though a long painstaking process by disabling drive indexing by Spotlight and then slowly narrowing it down by folders and found that a particular folder was causing Spotlight to go ballistic. Monitoring that folder found that zero changes were being made to that folder but for some reason Spotlight was being triggered by it.

Then a macOS update came along and the issue went away. Never drilled down into that folder to find the trigger(s) after that.

Was it ~/Library/Metadate/Corespotlight, @woodmeister? I had the same issue: it vanished in 26.4, off the tope of my head, then reappeared in 26.5.1 … !

Jun 16, 2026 2:29 PM in response to Paul Downie

I had an issue with that quite a while ago but it was causing my drive to fill up. Removing the folder fixed that issue and Spotlight started a new folder and was behaved after that.

The issue I referred to in the post was a library folder for some software that I use. However, I was getting excessive writes but I was not seeing any change in actual storage use.