Pages sharing causes long freezes on M1 Mac

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Level 2

157 points

Pages sharing causes long freezes on M1 Mac

Sharing a Pages document produces frequent stalls when I can do nothing but watch the spinning beachball cursor for as much as 10 seconds. As you can imagine, this is VERY disruptive. It happens within an app, and when I switch from one app to another and doesn't just involve Pages -- it affects all apps.

This is on an M1 Mac Studio and once the problem starts, it heats up the mac till it's quite hot to the touch. This never happens in other situations -- it always runs remarkably cool.

I've been sharing Pages docs for a year or so and sometimes fairly complex ones with tables of contents and 100 pages of text. This produced no problems at all until recently (possibly when I upgraded to MacOS Tahoe).

I've tried restarting Pages, restarting my Mac, running Disk Utility/First Aid from the recovery partition. None of those things made a difference. Watching activity monitor I see the the process corespotlightd is using the most CPU -- typically well over 100%.

Finally, I quit Pages and trashed the spotlight index (using a utility called Cocktail). This causes the index to be rebuilt during which time I still see corespotlightd using a lot of cycles. But once that has happened it doesn't use much in the way of resources and the problem seems to be cured: the spinning beach ball doesn't appear. But as soon as I used Pages again to share a document, the problem comes back.

My current theory is that there's a new bug in Pages which screws up the spotlight database. And the database won't fix itself. You have to trash it and start again.

Anybody have any thoughts about this? Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

Posted on Jun 25, 2026 1:54 PM

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Answer 1

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,642 points

Jun 26, 2026 10:02 AM in response to Steve Cohen4

Steve Cohen4 wrote:

Okay, thanks.

Two questions:

How do I report this to Apple?

For Pages, use the application menu > Provide Pages Feedback. For CoreSpotlightd, provide direct feedback to the macOS product team.

If I wanted to reinstall Pages, just for yuks, how would I do it?

If you never installed Pages v15 or later, and still retain Pages v14.4 or v14.5, these are no longer available from the Mac App Store, so cannot be reinstalled. Only restored from a Time Machine backup using the Time Machine application.

If you did install Pages v15 or later, then ensure you have a backup copy, move Pages.app to the Trash and empty the Trash, then reinstall from the Mac App Store.

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Answer 2

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,642 points

Jun 25, 2026 2:26 PM in response to Steve Cohen4

I do not share Pages documents either by email, or via iCloud, or Box. For Pages collaboration, there are some stringent operating system and Pages version requirements.

Although others appear to be reporting Pages and CoreSpotlightd running amok, I have no such issues here with Pages v15.2.1 on Tahoe 26.5.1 on two Macs, and Sequoia v15.7.7 on a third Mac. I do not use (nor recommend) third-party tools such as Cocktail. I do not use any anti-virus, VPN, or third-party so-called "Mac Cleaning" tools either. All of these have, or continue to cause problems with users applications and the operating system in general.

As for CoreSpotlightd, it is the daemon that triggers Spotlight to index filesystems, emails, messages, and app data. when they change. When you experience the problem you report, what workflow or Mac behavior triggers it?

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Answer 3

Steve Cohen4 Author

Level 2

157 points

Jun 25, 2026 2:51 PM in response to VikingOSX

I'm sharing between two Macs, both up to date with Tahoe. Pages is up to date, too. Sharing is using a file on iCloud for both people (I create the doc on my icloud drive and then share it via a link in Messages).

At one time I'll share a doc with one person and at another time, I'll share a different doc with a different person. In all cases, I'm experiencing long pauses where no keyboard input is registered and where you only see the beachball cursor. You can continue to type and when the beachball goes away, the characters you've typed will appear.

It's most noticeable when I switch from one app to another using the command-tab shortcut to bring up the row of app icons (you hit command-tab and the row of icons doesn't appear). But it also happens within apps -- all apps, it seems. I'm happily working and I click the mouse or start typing and bing, I freeze and must wait a good 5-10 seconds before the computer will respond to input. Corespotlightd is inevitably at the top of the process list in the CPU tab of activity monitor.

As for Cocktail, it's just a front end for a bunch of terminal commands, one of which is to trash the spotlight database and let it rebuild. That's the only thing that works.

This all worked just fine until I upgraded to Tahoe. I don't believe I did anything to my machine other than that.

I guess I could reinstall Pages if you think that might help. I don't know what else to try.

I should also add that I can share Numbers spreadsheets and Notes docs with the same computers and users and there are no problems with those apps.

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Answer 4

VikingOSX

Level 10

127,642 points

Jun 26, 2026 5:27 AM in response to Steve Cohen4

I don't believe reinstalling Pages will help with this issue. Unfortunately, I don't share Pages documents with others, much less via iCloud, so cannot test whether doing so would excite CoreSpotlightd on my Tahoe 26.5.1 Mac. Since I have no means to reproduce the issue, I cannot offer a fix. Have you confirmed that you have sufficient iCloud storage remaining?

You may need to wait for the next Pages and/or macOS update to see if the problem is something that the Apple product teams have resolved. Others have surely reported this to Apple via feedback channels whether for Pages or macOS.

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Answer 5

Steve Cohen4 Author

Level 2

157 points

Jun 26, 2026 7:15 AM in response to VikingOSX

Okay, thanks.

Two questions:

How do I report this to Apple?

If I wanted to reinstall Pages, just for yuks, how would I do it?

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