Spotlight Search causing high CPU/overheating on MacBook Pro

Exclude your internal drive from Spotlight indexing by adding it to the search privacy list.

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

As for a toggle, “we” are users like you and have no power to implement any suggestions. To have Apple consider your feedback, submit it here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

Spotlight does not normally use a lot of resources, but several users have had problems with it in recent versions.

One thing you can do that may reduce the burden is to delete one particular folder that may have grown out of hand. For many of the people affected, this has helped. Note: the folder is recreated automatically but should not grow back to a high size, and it being restored to default should also prevent the high cpu use of before.

Here is how you can delete the mentioned folder (again, this is harmless, as the folder will just be created anew, but to a default and with a small size):

1) In Finder, press Command-Shift-G and paste

~/Library/Metadata

2) Drag the CoreSpotlight folder to the trash, and empty it.

3) Restart

In all probability, Spotlight use of resources (especially since you already removed most of everything from it) will be residual.

curnla wrote:

I am wondering if Spotlight Search on OS Tahoe is a feature that some customers may rather not have? I find it useless for my personal workflow and I have never used it and I never will use it. I actually find it to be an annoyance as it used such a large percentage of my CPU space and it is often the cause of overheating of my rather new MacBook Pro. After trying so many ways to neuter Spotlight Search without success I finally wiped out my hard drive and stated over from scratch (reload via Time Machine). I see that so many features in Mac OS are optional and are activated of turned off by the use of a checkbox or a digital slider switch. I reall would love to be able to turn this feature off with a switch.

Turn off all categories...(?)

>System Settings>Spotlight

Submit your feedback here: Feedback - macOS - Apple

curnla wrote:

I did that also. I tried everything I could. In the end it didn’t stop spotlight and just slowed my computer down. Wiping and reinstalling reset it. I then excluded all of my personal files from search. I just can’t see the harm and the resistance to allowing users to turn off a feature that isn’t used or needed.

I believe the Finder search feature uses the same Spotlight index... this would be a limitation.