Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I did not have quite the same problem.

In my case Spotlight (mds_stores) was writing up to 100 GB per day and apparently deleting it instantly as nothing ever appeared on my SSD and there were no unpleasant symptoms.

However, it was causing massive unnecessary writes so I selected all my drives in System Settings/Spotlight/Search Privacy and the writing has completely ceased. Presumably all other Spotlight activity has stopped.

Luckily I can live without Spotlight.

I'm hoping to talk to yet another Apple senior advisor tomorrow (Saturday Feb. 15), not so much seeking a resolution for this issue as to provide Apple's engineers with as much detail about this issue as I can gather.

In pursuit of that goal, I have a question: is anyone seeing these large accumulations of metadata in the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/ folders (the latter is a separate folder on Intel systems) without using Pages?

In my experience, if I don't have a Pages document open, Spotlight metadata generally does not grow by more than a few hundred megabytes a day (which ain't nothing, but it's a lot less than the 10 GB/day or so I see if Pages is open). I'm curious if anyone has seen large increases in metadata despite not having Pages in use.

Hi I've been this problem huge time since March, when I did start editing a very large pages' file.

I discovered this bug report page just recently, I previously mitigated it by loop script killing corespotlight (lol) while using pages.

I updated to OS to 15.5 and will monitor the folder size with

while true; do clear; du -sh ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight; sleep 60; done

It seems strange to me that we do not have an official acknowledgment or statement from Apple about this issue, am I missing something?

And on my MacBook Pro I have a dodge of Spotlight diagnostics:

I understand your frustration; this situation goes back at least to the earliest days of Sequoia, and there's anecdotal evidence that it might go all the way back to Ventura or earlier. But given the complexity of the issue, and the seemingly random nature of its symptoms and proposed fixes, I'm honestly not surprised Apple has been unable to resolve the issue. As my posts have noted, I have four Macs: two with Intel processors and two with Apple Silicon processors. In my experience the problem is much more pervasive and severe in the former.

I'm assuming you've read the posts on this thread, and have come across the proposed fix that seems to be reasonably successful: deleting CoreSpotlight metadata from the folder ~/library/metadata. I started removing this data on a regular basis more than six months ago, and almost immediately saw substantial performance gains on the various systems. Has that not been your experience?

Since I've kept Spotlight metadata below ~50 GB/system, I have not seen excessive CPU use by any of the various Spotlight-related processes: corespotlightd, mdworker, mds, etc. Nor I have I seen system freezes, unresponsiveness, or any similar symptoms. I've also seen improved performance in Spotlight search and even Time Machine.

As long as I do not use Pages, all is fine with the CPU usage. There is some problem between Pages and OS that is doing this.

That's right - unless an issue is listed in Apple's update release notes, we can't know.

We can report the issue to apple via: Feedback - Pages - Apple - that link is specifically for 'Pages for macOS'. (Apologies if you and any other readers already have). It is through this mechanism that I have, in the past, for both Pages and Logic Pro, been contacted by Apple asking for more information about an issue I've raised and asking me to install a 'profile' which I then emailed back to them.

Beyond that, we can post to your favourite Mac news site such as https://www.macrumors.com, https://appleinsider.com/, https://9to5mac.com/, https://www.cultofmac.com/. Sometimes, these sites pick up on an apple community or forum if they notice it has become busy.

Pages crashed today. I captured the error log. Here are the 'highlights':

Process:               Pages [9167]

Path:                  /Applications/Pages.app/Contents/MacOS/Pages

Identifier:            com.apple.iWork.Pages

Version:               14.4 (7043.0.93)

Build Info:            Pages-7043000093000000~4 (1A89s)

App Item ID:           409201541

App External ID:       873302190

Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)

Parent Process:        launchd [1]

Date/Time:             2025-07-08 08:10:15.2254 +0100

OS Version:            macOS 15.5 (24F74)

Report Version:        12

Time Awake Since Boot: 75000 seconds

Time Since Wake:       911 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason:    Namespace LIBSYSTEM, Code 2 Application Triggered Fault

Application Specific Information:

assertion failure: "!view->_hasCachedVisibleRect" -> %llu

My hope is of course, that someone at Apple knows what all this means ... and that's it's relevant to our specific corespotlughtd issues.

Hello Fellow Frustrated Mac Users:

I had multiple calls with Apple Support with no resolution. As others have noted, the corespotlightd CPU overload can be triggered numerous ways. Currently, I have eliminated most of the triggers from my MacBook M4 16GB system, which included:

• • Mail App loaded with 300K messages trying to sync
  • WhatsApp indexing
  • iCloud Drive with 800+ GB of my 1 TB drive synced to it
  • Pages

I have found that when I reset my Mac to factory settings and then restore from Time Machine using a version from a couple days earlier, my system works perfectly for about 30 days. My last experience of corespotlightd CPU overload (300-400% usage) occurred a week ago and was specifically caused by my use of Pages (23.6 mb document). The cursor freezing would go away when I closed Pages doc, however I could still tell on Activity Monitor that my CPU load was still unhealthy (system % would idle at about 20%).

Once again, I reset my Mac to factory settings and then restored it from a Time Machine using a version from a few days earlier. I only have Apple apps installed on my MacBook. My machine is running perfect - System CPU % idle's at 2.36%.

If Apple is reading this, I do hope you've made this serious performance bug a priority to resolve in the next OS.

Privacy86

Can anyone here confirm whether or not they had 'Content Caching' enabled under sharing? I've uninstalled all iWork apps (Pages, Numbers) due to this resource usage issue, but disabling Content Caching seems to have helped further.

Also recommend disabling any large external drives from being indexed in spotlight. Hopefully MacOS 26 fully resolves this issue.

This is driving me positively nuts! I had to buy a new laptop because my MacBook Air wasn't powerful enough to run all the programs I need to use for my business that I'm in the start-up phase of. I use Apple Pages for writing reports. Big or small it doesn't seem to matter - this corespotlight issue is incredibly time consuming. I was hopeful that the new MacBook Air with 25g of ram (if I've got the terminology right, it's not as fresh in my mind as it was a few weeks ago) - but point is - after all the trouble I'd been having with overloading my air, I got the one that could handle the most and given it's the MacDaddy of all rams etc that have ever been seen on the face of technology - Apple exceeding the expectations of the user beyond compare - I was pretty confident all my report writing woes would go away.

WRONG.

Today I am here to share, not exactly a strategy to FIX the problem that you would think they could spare a penny for given the thousands of dollars we invest in the corporate giant (makes my blood boil when I feel ripped off and trapped since the alternatives have their own blood boilers) - ready to jump ship if there are any takers to up the Ante! But I've come across something that might at least help build a case. And since the time this is taking out of my day is fairly substantial, I am starting to think pulling my finger out and getting onto Support - the often painful process of getting onto Support (although, I don't mean to complain - this is one of the stand out reasons I stay with Apple - it truly is an awesome service, just not how I like to spend my hours or days) - might be worth a shot.

So I thought I'd start taking some screen shots when the pin wheel happens, while I'm using Pages to write my reports. I have Activity Monitor open on a dual screen, so I can capture it pretty quickly using the command+shift+3 keyboard shortcut.

Something 'kind of' interesting happened. You will see in the screenshot of the screenshots that in the space of almost an hour I've taken 15 screenshots.

• x3 of those you will see were taken only seconds apart.
• So - what that means is (I'll explain more in the next bullet) you can take that number off the 15 and make that 12 times in almost an hour - that's 5 times in one hour that I've been forced to stop my work - this could get expensive for Apple if I start adding up how much that's costing me when my hourly rate is nearly $200.00 per hour. Deadset - lifting the boycott on Microsoft Office is starting to look like a fair call (also some other gripes with Pages tables and not being able to change to landscape in a new section, but that's another story).
• Now, the reason for the x3 screenshots that are seconds apart is that I noticed what was happening is, when you take the screenshot, it momentarily switches the %CPU from the high use back down below 100 (usually around 93%, down from 170 - 180%), and by the time the system has collected itself and takes the screenshot the image that it captures isn't showing the high %.
• My paranoid mind almost went down the rabbit hole that they've rigged it so we can't provide evidence 🤣, but then I realised it must somehow reset it for a moment because if you monitor it immediately after it jumps back up and that's when you need to take your screenshot again and capture the high %

I figure, if I have a hefty collection like that over a few hours surely Support would look into it - what if we all tried it and swamped them?!!!

I'm interested to hear how anyone else goes with it. I'm not sure when I'll get around to calling them. It depends if I give in and buy a Microsoft subscription, or maybe Google Docs will do the trick for the time being. It'll all come down to what seems the best investment of my time because writing this post alone has taken long enough!

Adding a few afterthoughts.

• I'm now paying more attention to the %CPU before it pauses and have noted that it's not always high when it happens. Could be down in the 80's or 90's. But after the pause and then the screenshot works, it'll jump back up.
• Might be worth noting that it also does not always 'pinwheel' - just freezes - it's happening now as I'm typing this (Pages open in the background).
• Pages will randomly close - all Pages docs open just closed. If you haven't got auto save on or thought to save it say goodbye to all your hard work
• Today I also went to the docs I am working on in Finder and changed the to 'Keep download' since I figured perhaps that might help it not sync to iCloud.
• I feel like it might have something to do with 'Autosave' but I'm not game to turn it off to try in case I loose all my work when it shuts down spontaneously like it has been.
• The keyboard has been doing strange things also - not letting me go back to where the cursor was, running off and doing its own thing. The accent thing that pops up if you hold the letter down was appearing randomly today. All seems to be tying in with this corespotlight issue.
• Ok yep - it just deleted my whole sentence!
• I updated to the new software this morning - 15.6.1

How is this not fixed yet? I've written Apple 3 times now since the start of the year to report this bug, kept my computer up to date, and I still have to delete GBs worth of data from the CoreSpotlight folder every single day as this bug has lingered for over a year now. What is Apple doing?