Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Hi, Mitch. After talking with Apple Support, I discovered I had a different problem. I'm a bit embarrassed about it. Router performance is basic 101 troubleshooting and I failed to speed test the router as part of looking into continued lags and spinning wheels after I had turned off Apple Intelligence (which successfully addressed corespotlightd hogging the CPU). I ran a speed test and it showed my router was running at an upload speed of 2.61, dreadfully slow, especially when working with large documents on iCloud (where all my Pages documents reside). Also, there's several discussions out there regarding how quickly we can upload documents to iCloud, which might cause delays and even spinning wheels while editing large documents, like the Pages documents I've been working with. So, I'll need to decide if I want to fork out $50 a month to increase my upload speed or just move my large Pages docs to my computer and back them up to my external drive. >>sigh<<

Update: Slow upload data speeds appear to be causing lags/spinning wheels while working in my larger Pages documents on iCloud. I often work at remote locations using a VPN. I have no control over the upload speeds on these remote Wifi connections (community college Wifi, coffee shops, etc). So, I moved my large Pages files off iCloud drive to my computer drive. Since moving the files, I have not encountered any issues high CPU usage, lags, or spinning wheels while working on those documents. Emboldened, I turned on Apple Intelligence and so far, everything is working perfectly. No processes are hogging the CPU and there are no delays/spinning wheels while working within any app, including Pages.

Slightly OT, but I've often had the same questions about what Apple means with "%CPU." Obviously Apple does not make single-core systems anymore; my two Intel Macs have 8-core CPUs (one is a Core i7 and the iMac Pro is a Xeon) with hyperthreading turned on, meaning (in some sense) they have 16 cores. My Mac Studio has a 20-core M1 Ultra and my MBP has a 12-core M2 Max.

So if corespotlightd is using, say, 750% of CPU time on an 8-core CPU with hyperthreading, what does that actually mean? In my experience very few processes impose any kind of load on the 8 virtual cores. You'd think with Apple Silicon it would be more straightforward, with no virtual cores (although performance vs. efficiency probably complicates matters somewhat). But what's puzzling to me is that I'll watch my Mac Studio spin-lock as corespotlightd spikes up to say 225% CPU, but looking at CPU history in Activity Monitor, I'll see that eight of 20 cores have essentially zero load on them.

I know that some processes have to run on an individual core and cannot be split across multiple cores. But it sure seems like even if corespotlightd were pinning four cores, other processes, like say typing into an email, should still be able to use other processors that are seemingly idling.

Is this an issue with the Mach scheduler? I mean ultimately it's hard not to blame a process that can soak up nearly 800% of "%CPU" but still….

Mitch Stone wrote:

By any chance did you look at the graph at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window when this was happening to see how much of the CPU remained idle? I still think it is odd that this process can be reported as taking up 100 percent and more of the CPU in the process list, when the summary at the bottom of the window shows the CPU as rarely being less than 80 percent idle.

I don't remember specifically but I know the CPU looked pretty pinned in all three places: CPU usage, CPU history, and the utilization graph at the bottom of the Activity Monitor window. In any case, I'd never seen a single process use remotely this kind of CPU time before. All this, just to index the filesystem? Seems kind of insane.

Fortunately, force-quitting the processes restored normality.

When I was experiencing the freezing issue, the graph would occasionally show a system spike, but the idle figure never dropped below about 75%. It never seemed to me to be about the CPU, but more about how many other processes to show as 'stuck'. However, I never saw a 'not-responding' in red in the Activity Monitor, only the 'stuck' state in a Terminal window with TOP -s 5 -o state.

Mitch Stone wrote:

I've tried force-quitting the process. It restarts around 15 seconds later.

That's true, but usually if it was using 800% of CPU time and then I force-quit, it will at least go back to more reasonable resource usage, like 150% or so.

Which is still preposterous for a process that just indexes files.

Firstly, thank you deeply to the person that made this thread and came to the realization about Pages. I was going crazy trying to research corespotlightd and having nothing work. Secondly, is this likely to be fixed with Sequoia 15.3? Finally, while I don't have much to add other than confirmations of what's already been said, I have noticed that corespotlightd will inevitably start to bug after a while no matter how small the document is. It simply takes longer. If I open my big document of hundreds of pages, it's immediately. But I've also had open files that are just 2 pages, and while everything remained calm for a while, after about 30 minutes it's back to acting up again, despite iCloud for Pages and Apple Intelligence being deactivated.

Also, before disabling any iCloud app sync I didn't need, I was also having major issues with several iCloud daemons (technically still am, just to a much lesser extent). This whole thing feels like an Apple Intelligence related screw up, where (for whatever reason) the system is wrongfully tasked with a process it cannot complete, or, it is unable to recognize the task has already been completed. I don't mean this as in Apple Intelligence the service itself, I mean regarding whatever software changes they made to the OS outside of Apple Intelligence in order to accommodate for it (if that makes sense).

I upgraded just a week ago from a base model M1 MacBook Air to an M4 Pro Macbook Pro and on that Air I didn't get to update to 15.2 because I was having issues getting the update to download properly, but I'm grateful, cause I never had any issues on that device related to Pages or iCloud. This M4 Pro came with 15.2 already installed, and I believe I had to update my iWork apps for the current version (which I regret). Whenever Pages is opened the fans will inevitably kick in (CPU increase), the battery drain is as severe as if I was using DaVinci Resolve, and the disk will write over 80mb every 10 or so seconds. Whenever I force quit corespotlightd it simply restarts extremely aggressively, writing over 100mb every second. At its absolute worst, before I found this thread and tried the remedies, I had lost over 60GB of storage space in just a couple hours (labeled as System Data). The disk write per 8-10 seconds was in the low hundreds.

Last thing worth noting, when I tried logging into my Apple ID during the initial setup for my M4 Pro (with Sequoia 15.2 already installed), I would get the rainbow wheel about 10 seconds after doing so. I would reach the screen for setting up the system and profile name, and then I'd get hit with the rainbow. This happened to me twice in a row before I decided to just skip logging into my Apple ID upon setup, and when I did that, the device setup went perfectly fine. Not sure if this is related, but considering all the iCloud issues I figured it's worth noting.

CaptainJoy wrote:

ericmurphysf asked:

How heavy a user of Pages are you?

I use Pages all the time. As a rule, I always have at least one Pages document open, and often one or more are >10 MB.

I suspect this is the root of the problem. I don't know if the amount of metadata accumulated on your system is comparable to mine, but for the last quarter of last year I was editing at least one file (on multiple Macs) that by that time had grown to ~200 MB (roughly 1,200 pages with many embedded graphics), and I'm pretty certain the result was half a terabyte of metadata saved in my user library folder. I strongly suspect a consequence of that amount of metadata was system instability, major issues with Time Machine backups, and degraded search performance in Spotlight to the point of unusability.

Since deleting this metadata last week, all three of these issues have resolved. The one remaining issue is that metadata continues to accumulate at an alarming rate, which will likely force me to remove it just as I did the last time, probably within the next two months. I'm pretty sure this is a bug somewhere in Apple's code that will need to be resolved via a future macOS update.