User profile for user: Mitch Stone
Mitch Stone Author
User level: Level 2
223 points

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I am wondering if anyone has discovered any new ideas for stopping the corespotlightd process from hogging the CPU. According to Activity Monitor, the corespotlightd process often occupies more than 100% of the CPU load, sometimes spiking as high as 400% on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio. This problem has become so severe that it often pinwheels under normally non-intensive tasks. It can cause the video to flicker on my Studio Display. In one case it caused my Mac to kernel panic (crash).


I encountered this bug only after installing Sequoia 15.2, but having researched this issue extensively, I find that Mac users have identified it since at least macOS Ventura. So here are some solutions we don't need to hear again:


Reindexing Spotlight by adding and removing volumes in Spotlight Privacy. This provides relief only temporarily. Within hours the process is again grinding the Mac to a halt.


Killing the corespotlightd in Activity Monitor. Again, this is at best only a temporary solution as the process will reinstate itself.


A "clean" install of macOS. First of all, no such process really exists. The OS recovery process simply reinstalls a new copy of the System files. Nobody reports this as a fix. An internal drive wipe and reformat, and restore from Time Machine is also unlikely to help, as it simply returns your Mac to its previous state. If the corespotlightd problem results from a corrupted file, the problem will likely simply be recreated in your reinstall. "Nuke and pave" might solve the problem if it caused by a format or directory issue on your startup volume. This does not seem to be the case, but if anyone has permanently cured the problem by this method, please report it.


What we do need to hear is from anyone who has spent time with Apple Support on this issue and been provided with solutions that actually work, or has new ideas about what causes it. Feels like we're on our own here, since Apple seems to be stumped.



Posted on Dec 19, 2024 11:21 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply
User profile for user: fronesis47
fronesis47
User level: Level 2
173 points

Posted on Feb 9, 2025 10:26 AM

After the better part of another day thinking about and troubleshooting this issue, I am convinced that Eric Murphy's earlier hypothesis is correct. There's a bug in Sequoia, which anyone can replicate by following these 2 steps:

  1. Open a Pages file (and keep it open).
  2. Watch the size of this folder balloon: ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight


The larger that folder gets, the more likely it is that the corespotlightd process will start taking over the CPU and causing slowdowns for the Mac user. The corespotlightd process is what gets most people's attention, but it's only a symptom of the underlying problem whereby the spotlight processes (mdworker, etc.) write enormous amounts of data into the corespotlight subfolders.


The bigger the Pages file the quicker the folder grows in size; the more frequently one uses Pages, or leaves Pages files open, the worse the problem.


There is no fix until apple implements one, and the only viable workaround is to monitor the size of that folder and occasionally delete it.


One silver lining: it's not clear to me that there is any need to delete your spotlight index, to turn indexing off and on, etc. The problem stems from the size of that metadata folder, and you can alleviate the problem by deleting the folder. In my experience (having deleted the folder many dozen times), spotlight works just fine without rebooting, reindexing, or anything else.


I came up with my own way of dealing with this issue: I wrote a simple shell script that trashes the corespotlightfolder; then I added that as a service in launchd so that it can run regularly (maybe every 2 days).

View in context
190 replies
Sort By: 

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.
Learn more Sign up