Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Tried playing around with a Microsoft Word file that was an exported Pages doc and even though the system is seemingly calm at rest, if I was to make the smallest edit possible (literally just pressing space bar) the response is actually somehow much worse than if it were just a normal Pages file. There is also a new issue of the read amount being absurdly high alongside the high write speed (when editing a Word doc). The response I get from a Pages file is more gradual and irrespective of what I do, the response I get from the Word doc is 100% reactive. Each and every edit no matter how small or simple will trigger a massive CPU and disk spike. If I do nothing it goes back to normal, however the disk read will continue to be elevated for around 8-10 seconds. This is a file that isn't even in the iCloud Pages folder, it's completely offline.

Additionally, losing hope at this point that this whole issue will be fixed in the next update but of course I don't know for sure. This app was an amazing switch and I did get several months of use out of it before this issue arose but I still wish I was able to go through all the phases of my project before this happened. I was willing to eat the disk write damage to the SSD cause at least I could pretend like it's not happening but the CPU spikes so high that it makes the fans kick and it's legitimately not something I can work around.

If for whatever reason you simply need to be able to read/present your document with all comments and chapters intact, export to Word. PDF allows comments but not as intuitively. I'm actually shocked how much information is perfectly retained in the Word doc.

Absolutely happening to me-- corespotlightd spilking CPU and system glitching

on brand-new MacBook Pro Apple M4 Pro running 15.3.1

started about 4 weeks after I migrated over. all problem solving failed. reset to factory settings- and no migration. same issue presented. brought back to apple- they did firmware reinstall and set back to factory settings. can now confirm this continues to happen when and only when I am running pages- generally my pages docs are re-edit of forms with numerous past editions. I quit pages and glitching and CPU spikes go away

I already tried all the listed suggestions. And the issue seemingly does not manifest consistently for everyone. I know there's been a primary focus on system folders but that was always the lesser of my problems. The spikes I see aren't ignorable, they bump CPU usage up to a consistent 40%+ on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro unless I close the app. There is no way the app can be seen as usable when it's single handedly taking up nearly half the CPU power. Battery drainage is also significant as within minutes it's as high as if I was using video editing software. I would've ignored everything else if it meant I could get back to using this app cause I have things that need to get done at the end of the day and I'd much prefer to use this app as the primary choice but the impact on my machine beyond the SSD writes and deletable folders is way too much. Activity Monitor isn't why I can't ignore it, it's how I get met with immutable fan noise and system slowdown. These are also issues I have always had bundled together rather than it being something that appeared later after the system folder issues.

Also, in response to LAWM0N, I was using a Word doc in the Pages app, rather than using the Word app (I don't own it).

How do you delete meta data folders? I'm really not tech savy, but I'm experiencing the same issues as other are talking about. I'm writing a thesis and when I open the pages document, which is very large, my computer starts to have intermittent lags and cursor freezes.

I would like to use a work around for now, until apple figures out a solution.

ScottRichardson wrote:

I just experienced this issue and my ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight was 50GB when I first looked, and within an hour it was 60GB in size! I just deleted that, and my caches folder and it appears to have fixed the issue. Thanks for the wonderful folk in here who identified a way to fix it for now.

One thing I've noticed (and the actual figure may differ depending on your system architecture, memory, storage space, etc.) is that once Spotlight metadata gets to a certain size, its growth begins to snowball. On my system, and seemingly on yours, that size is ~50 GB. It might take one of my Intel systems eight or nine days from when I delete all the metadata until it gets to 50 GB, but from there it's rarely more than a few hours before it gets to 60.

Mitch Stone wrote:

Out of curiosity, I performed another Get Info on my Corespotlight folder. It is now 12.2 GB. Looking back a couple of months into this discussion, I found I'd reported it back then at 37 GB. I have never trashed this folder. So it seems it can actually get smaller without user intervention.

This is definitely true on Apple Silicon systems. I've never seen it happen on either of my Intel systems.

Hi! And here I was wondering why my two M2 Macbooks (one from 2023, other from 2025) and a brand new iPhone 16E all connected through a Cloud sharing one simple small 7-8 pages long Pages document which is almost always open on some of the device... keep bumping up CPU to 100-300% in Activity Monitor, having caused one of the computers to completely freeze and crash two times already and constantly heating up the other.

The Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder is 50GB, the store.db files alone takes up like 8GB each. If I close Pages and just keep TextEdit open with an iCloud-shared file, the spotlightd process does sometimes come up and spike up to a 100 percent but at least the computer isn't hot to physically touch anymore.

What would you recommend, please? Reboots don't help, killing the spotlightd process in Activity Monitor helps only for a few minutes. Closing the Pages app helps but unfortunately I really need the document, it's the only reason why I didn't buy a pen and paper instead.

I'm a bit puzzled – these three Apple devices together in 2025 cost about as much as a new car but they're incapable of handling basic text editing computers in 1991 managed well? I'm really not used to a brand new Mac with nothing but 1 file in a text editor open running a spinning rainbow wheel while I try to write simple letters. Please help. Thank you so much!

Thanks Erik. Unfortunately before I had a chance to read that I used a suggestion from an Apple Developers Forum where there's a thread on the subject with a seemingly legit solution. A user pasted a set of commands to run for Terminal which I ran and that included sudo rm -rf... which, possibly because they contain a typo I hastily overlooked, successfully wiped out not only the entire Metadata folder but my entire computer - all my files left unbacked up at that point as I was trying to move things around for the Cloud when this Spotlight bug kicked in and made the computer hardly responsive. Oh well.

The lesson here - anyone looking for suggestions to fix this, please be very careful what you try. People are capable of giving you absolutely destructive instructions even on the developers forum. Please double-check anything before you run anything.

Update: I agree the problem is primarily with Sequoia as I didn't have this at all until that update.

Since realizing the connection with Pages documents and the solution of emptying the ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder, I have only had to empty the folder twice. (about every 3 weeks of heavy use).

Key Points:

1. Turn OFF the Pages App when you are not using it. My Corespotlight folder WILL reduce in size when Pages is closed.
   1. Duplicate large/old Pages files in the finder and work with them. I've broken some documents into parts.
2. Empty the ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder when you notice slow down (on Activity Monitor or other).
3. Hope that Apple fixes the problem.

Thank you to those who gave safe solutions..

I too am experiencing this same problem. I've reinstalled OS several times. I concur with the conclusions that it is somehow related to Pages and Spotlight. Looking forward to seeing a permanent solution because this is crippling my M4 Max. Thanks everyone

I bought a new M4 MacBook Air [10c/24GB/1TB] Running MacOS 15.3.2] and did not use Migration Assistant. I did turn iCloud Drive on, but I did NOT turn on Desktop and Documents Folders. So I have no data on my SSD, just the OS. I opened large Pages (475 kB) and Numbers (35MB) files from my iCloud Drive that I update through the day and so they are open most of the time. In activity monitor, I noticed that Pages was spiking up to 50 to 70 % when running in the background (whereas the large Numbers file was at 0.4%). Next, I noticed the OS was laggy when command tabbing between apps and saw that corespotlightd and/or kernal_task were sitting at > 200%! (As I type this, corespotlightd is at 126.7%). I reported all issues via Apple's Feedback page. I have also had Numbers doing SBBoD and/or crashing and Apple News has crashed several times too. This behaviour is persistent since I set the Mac up on March 13th 2025.

I have experienced CPU Overload since year end. Grateful for this support thread. I have to move 20-25 GB to Trash from two Metadata folders EVERY DAY! Otherwise overload issues slow computer immensely and geometrically.

While I remain grateful for this bandage method, I want permanent fix. Apple Support had me delete hard drive at year-end, because they could not figure out problem (they should have seen this thread!). I'm still suffering from that unnecessary action.

We've had one Sequoia update since then, but NO improvement to CPU Overload issue. I want to hear status report FROM APPLE! This seems clearly to be software error and will need software fix. The seasons are passing. Time's up! Apple needs to fix this or upgrade my CPU to Apple Silicon, which seems immune to this problem

iMac > 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel i7 > Sequoia 15.3.2 (24D81)

My M4 mini has been behaving perfectly since Sequoia 15.4. When I first got it, it was extremely fast for my purposes (mostly Pages and web) - and it got slower and slower. I am very pleased it is back to how it should have been all the way through.

My M1 MBP had never been as bad - and it too seems to be altogether somewhat faster.

Hoping this continues to be the case - and it fixes the issues for everyone else.

KWiPod wrote:

Since updating to MacOS Sequoia 15.4 (24E248) on Monday March 31st, all the spiking issues I described have stopped. Fingers crossed !

It's only been a few hours since I updated to 15.4, but so far the signs, at least on my Intel 27-inch iMac, are not encouraging. CoreSpotlightd isn't using much CPU time (7% on an 8-core system with hyperthreading turned on), but immediately after the update the (relocated) CoreSpotlight metadata was at around 2.6 GB (I'd deleted it all last night before the update to 15.4). It's now about two and a half hours later, and already metadata is up to 24.3 GB (with a large Pages file open). Before 15.4, after deleting metadata it would typically take closer to two days to get to 24 GB. If anything 15.4 seems to have worsened the problem of extremely rapid buildup of Spotlight metadata.

The next experiment will be to quit Pages for a while and see if metadata comes down in size. I've seen this many times on Apple Silicon systems, but the only way I've ever been able to reduce the size of Spotlight metadata on Intel systems is by manually deleting it.