Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

The issue is still with us in MacOS Sequoia 15.6.1.

I saw a post (via an email from this community) from Privacy86 in which he stated "I just installed xxxx and it appears to have fixed the CPU overload...at least as far as I can tell so far!"

The email link produces the error page "Looking for something in Apple Support Communities?"

This is because Privacy86's post was removed (as was my original version of this post) as it mentions a xxxx version of MacOS.

A few days ago, Apple contacted me and asked for some diagnostics - which I sent and got a thanks.

I think that the issue is having less impact than at one point. But still get beachballs regularly. And just maybe I automatically close Pages and Numbers when I'm not actively using them - sort-of habituated into doing so! Thus avoiding things like having the same documents open on two machines.

Yes, my post was removed by Apple. And it was premature. 😢

My corespotlightd issues are worse than they have ever been… my MacBook Pro M4 is unusable / frozen for seconds at a time.

Pages is the primary culprit, but the freezing occurs without it as well.

Apple should be ashamed for remaining silent on this issue - it has been impacting my new MacBook for almost a year now.

Thank you for letting us all know Privacy86.

It looks like September isn't going to bring us a solution.

Back here in 15.6.1 land, my 2025 M4 MacBook Air is, like your M4 MacBook Pro is unusable. And like you, I am astonished that Apple has not even so much as acknowledged the corespotlightd issue.

First let me say, I find Apple discussion very confusing to figure out. It seems almost completely random which post I am reply to, which posts I see first, in what order I see posts. Also frustrating is when I click a post I receive in an email, it never takes me to that post.

As to the issue at hand, tentavely it seems to have resolved for me. I have had a pages file open for days, made a few edits to it, and my ~/Library/Metadate/corespotlightd is currently <1 KB. (you read that right, the size of the folder is in bytes) Granted, it's a small file.

I'm on a Macbook Air M3, and the resolution has persisted through the update to 15.6.

As others have said, there are likely several factors at work, and I am leaving the pages file open and monitoring Activity Monitor. It has been suggested to focus on performance issues rather than AM, however, I find some performance issues can be hard to detect until they really bite me, e.g. battery depletion with lid closed. I monitor AM and if I see a spike, I montior it more closely to see if it persists or subsides. I also send occasional feedback to Apple on the issue.

Hey there, on the crazy sorting of post go to your profile>Subscriptions, look for edit preferenceson the right and scroll all the way down and look for default thread sort, choose oldest… grrrrrr Apple!

PolyRod wrote:

A few days ago, Apple contacted me and asked for some diagnostics - which I sent and got a thanks.

I think that the issue is having less impact than at one point. But still get beachballs regularly. And just maybe I automatically close Pages and Numbers when I'm not actively using them - sort-of habituated into doing so! Thus avoiding things like having the same documents open on two machines.

This has been my experience for the most part. I have not seen serious performance issues with corespotlight processes interacting with Pages in quite some time (other than if I happen to leave Pages open on my M2 MBP, battery life suffers dramatically, even with the lid closed).

But it appears that if anything, the macOS 15.6.1 update has exacerbated the issue of rapidly-accumulating corespotlight metadata. I ran the update last week, and over the weekend, with both Pages and Numbers closed on my 2020 27-inch iMac, metadata piled up to well over 100 GB, the highest it's been in more than six months. I deleted it Monday morning, and by this morning (Tuesday), it was back up over 60 GB. Two and a half hours later, it was already up to almost 17 GB. That suggests I may have to delete metadata once more before I leave for the day.

That said, I'm not seeing much in the way of performance degradation. The CPU load is roughly 20%, and no spotlight processes appear to be in the top 10 for CPU use.

One might assume this is because with it being the 'Beta' version, this would mean they are still ironing out issues and therefore any problems with it shouldn't 'unnecessarily' deter users from updating when they release the official public release...

Therefore implying such problems will be gone by the time we get the standard release?! Ha! I won't hold my breath...

It does beg the question though - does that imply an Apple consultant is actually monitoring and therefore aware of this thread - or was it a bot that removed your email? Given your experience - whatever they've done to 'fix' it - is far from finding the root of the cause because their scrambling to work it out?

Worth sharing that following my last comment, after the course of the next 5 hours resulting in another 82 pin wheels (screenshots taken each time it paused, I forgot a few), I gave in and paid for a Microsoft 365 subscription so that I could use Word 😔. Changes etc to their programs have reinforced my belief that it is a rought! But it's returned my work flow to how a computer should run whilst using Word, so I play the game.

My calculations of time lost:

82/5 =16.4 occurrences each hour.

I haven't yet timed how long the screen is stuck for, but lets say 10 seconds on a short stint.

That's a total loss of 13 minutes and 40 seconds over 5 hours. Never mind the interruption in flow of thoughts and the distraction/impact on efficiency.

That's significant.

In a world where we rely on technology in a multi-billion dollar industry, us minions appear to be merely slaves to their busy lives. Maybe we should all change industries so that we're not reliant on these programs - wouldn't that be a different world!

I've just started having this problem on my M3 Max MacBook Pro. As others have reported, the problem is associated with Pages. I had several shorts Pages documents open at the same time and the problems may have started when I began inserting emoji characters in the text or when I started sharing the documents. The thing I find most peculiar (and disturbing) are the ~10 second keyboard and mouse freezes. That shouldn't happen just because of corespotlightd's CPU usage. A deeper I/O resource allocation issue must be at the core of this. I hope it doesn't mean we're all infected with the same key logger!

I am experiencing beach balling on my powerful M4 Mac mini (32gb of ram). Basic tasks are now beach balling.

I see that corespotlightd in Activity Monitor is above 100% of CPU; which led me to this post.

I am curious. The recommendation is to trash everything from the Corespotlight folder. Does that mean everything? I saw here that someone said they 'left the folder structure' intact, or they deleted the spotlight knowledge events folder contents; however, that spotlight knowledge events folder IS a part of the core spotlight folder - so what can safely be deleted? Can someone confirm?

David MacVicar wrote:

I am curious. The recommendation is to trash everything from the Corespotlight folder. Does that mean everything? I saw here that someone said they 'left the folder structure' intact, or they deleted the spotlight knowledge events folder contents; however, that spotlight knowledge events folder IS a part of the core spotlight folder - so what can safely be deleted? Can someone confirm?

Everything.

I have deleted the Corespotlight folder and all its sub-folders at least a dozen times over the past 6 months, never with any ill effects.

i have an issue with my iMessage

My experience was that it took about 24 hours for corespotlightd to settle down to normal levels of activity.

I'll be patient

I checked Activity Monitor on my M2 MBA 8 hours after turning off Apple Intelligence and the CPU usage for corespotlightd was 0.0% !