Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

ericmurphysf wrote:

I definitely don't know, but I think it's safe to assume that this folder (or these folders) definitely should not be more than a hundred GB.

Agreed. All of MacOS only takes up around 23Gb of space. This metadata folder simply shouldn't grow to more than a few Gbs.

I also think it's relevant that there seems to be, on my system, NO DOWNSIDE to deleting the metadata folder. Spotlight works just as well, maybe better than before. (And note that I am NOT reindexing, toggling the indexing status, or doing anything at all with spotlight – just deleting this folder.)

Mitch wrote:

My issues with this process hogging the CPU seem ridiculously random.

But have you ever had the corespotlightd CPU problem when the metadata folder was fewer than 10Gbs in size?

I can attest that I have not. Corespotlightd processes only become a problem for me when the metadata folder grows to around 30Gb or so. Before that, it's fine.

CaptainJoy wrote:

Feb 11 6:28 PM — trashed the contents• of ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight and ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents which immediately resulted in:

corespotlightd down to <25%

• Disk writing no longer happening constantly

• Every indication this has "fixed" my problems.

This was the 2nd time I've had to "fix" my sluggish, cursor freezing, beach-ball generating 2024 M4 Mac Mini running Sequoia 15.3. I put "fix" in quotes because this is only a temporary solution. The last time I had to implement this "fix" was 3 February, so it seems to last about a week for me. I was no longer keeping Pages documents open unless actively using them ; I think I'll go back to leaving my planner Pages document open like I used to and see how much it cuts down the time before my next "fix".

PS AshkaTheMoltenFury is an hilarious handle.

I'm not certain how significant this is, but I have yet to need to remove the above-referenced folders on either of the two Apple Silicon systems I own: a M1 Ultra Mac Studio or an M2 Max MBP. Neither system's Spotlight metadata folders have ever exceeded 50 GB, and I have not seen serious performance degradations* on either one.

But I've had to remove Spotlight metadata twice each from my two Intel systems, a 27-inch iMac and an iMac Pro. I deleted this data once on each system when it had more than 500 GB of metadata in these folders, and then once again on both systems when metadata exceeded 100 GB a week or so later.

In all four cases, I saw immediate performance improvements, especially in Spotlight searches (which had been essentially inoperative once metadata exceeded about 250 GB), and Time Machine backups never starting let alone completing. And so far literally no downsides whatsoever to removing this data.

_______________________________

• I did for a short time see issues on the Mac Studio with 10-30-second freezes, especially during video playback, one or two of what looked like kernel panics (the system simply shut down entirely the first time, and then shut down and restarted the second time), along with some oddities with Time Machine. Either coincidentally or not, once I removed the excess metadata from the two Intel machines, these problems seemed to resolve on the Mac Studio via unknown and unguessable mechanisms. I should probably note that all four of these systems are under the same iCloud account.

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

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.

Hi Mitch. I always assumed the issue was related to Pages. But this latest spike persisted for hours even with all apps closed and my SSD and iCloud removed from indexing. [ChatGPT suggested that a corespotlightd spike of >200% (which is happening as I type this accompanied by the SBBoD!) is likely is an indexing loop or bad database, and advised deleting the index in Terminal with sudo mdutil -E /. 

I did this and nothing changed!

So, it’s now 4 hours later . . .  during that time, I reinstalled Sequoia and after logging back in, corespotlightd did its spiky thing for around 15 mins and now, finally, all is back to normal. Activity Monitor is reporting that 97% of CPU is free and just a few Efficiency Cores are ticking over as I write this in the Notes app. Such bliss: this M4 MacBook Air is such a spectacular machine . . . when it functions normally.

I have not yet opened Pages: before I dare to do that (and risk turning my Mac’s performance back into the MacPlus I owned in 1986), I have placed all the Pages documents upon which I am currently working in a folder called ‘In Progress’ on the Desktop. Using the System Settings Search Privacy tool, I have excluded this folder from Spotlight’s purview (I hope!)

If I need to open any other Pages documents as I work, I will add them to this In Progress folder before I risk opening them!

I will update this post and let folk know if it’s a strategy that works … when I open Pages and start work in the next hour.

BYW, I have reported this corespotlightd problem via Apple’s Feedback web pages for Mac OS and for Pages. Back in 2013, I did the same thing for a process called mdworker (which was also Pages related, in fact it was caused by ONE single Pages document that was full of graphics, originally created in ClarisWorks, whose documents could be imported into Pages.) I was contacted by Apple (by email) and the Pages team asked me to send the Pages file and install a profile on my Mac. I did both, sent Apple the profile file . . . and the next OS update [or it may have been Pages update, I don’t recall] solved the issue. 

That was a pretty niche issue, and yet the Pages Team reached out to me. The current issue is far less niche as it seems to affect anyone who uses Pages. Wouldn’t it be superb, if Apple reached out to one of us for this latest Pages/corespotlightd crisis!

I may have some good news regarding the corespotlightd issue. In Sequoia I had pretty much the same overload issue with corespotlightd that most of you have reported. To resolve it I moved the long Pages document that seemed to be causing the problem from iCloud to my home folder. That cleared up the problem for me.

I recently updated to Tahoe 26. Apple has made a number of important changes to the Spotlight.app. I was curious to see if the overload problem had been addressed. I moved the long pages document back to iCloud. The CoreSpotlight folder increased from about 1.5 GB to about 3.0 GB over a period of 8 hours or so and the Activity Monitor showed corespotlightd working under 10%. My Mac mini M4 remains cool to the touch. I'll report again in a day a two if anything changes, but for the moment I'm much encouraged.

J'ai eu le même problème et après avoir désactivé apple intelligence (temps d'écran - contenu et confidentialité - Intelligence et Siri - tout désactiver) le problème est résolu pour le moment !!!

So … a couple of updates:

1). Talked to Apple Support yesterday. They took lots of notes, and have passed the issue on to MacOS engineering.

2). It’s been 3 days since I turned off Apple Intelligence on my iMac, and it has returned to normal operation - it took about 24 hours for things to settle down (I was seeing spikes in corespotlightd, but it would come down off them). Since then it’s been behaving itself.

3). Regarding the system CPU usage spikes, I was seeing some spikes of processes like kernel_task when things got into a really hairy state. I suspect this is related to resource allocation issues where corespotlightd may have been demanding exclusive access to particular resources and then getting into the weeds. (This would also explain the escalating stuck process count in top, now that I think about it).

I'm chiming in to document very similar issues and use-case scenarios. Lots of Pages docs open through iCloud storage (grad school student). I started noticing the slow down occurrences in the fast 2 weeks, with growing regularity. I've been running 15.3 for most of that time I believe. The effects show up across every app. The most drastic occurrences seem to be in my Notes app. I've got tons of notes, a few collaborative, some small, some large. I often get a slow down while typing in notes, and regularly have the app freeze on me and require a forced quit of the Notes. Pages has had those slow blips, but never a full freeze and force quit.

I've disabled Apple Intelligence, and switched off the option of sharing Spotlight data with Apple. It seems that has kept the identical "corespotlightd" process from overloading my system constantly, although I am watching Activity Monitor spike with "corespotlightd" over 100% once in a while.

Just got off a 30 minute phone call with Apple Support. Their engineer team is aware of the issue and have been since February 8th, 2025. The person I spoke to added my case to the engineer team's file on the issue. They are also now aware of this thread. The person I spoke to read everything posted here. The thread itself is also now attached to their file.

I think everyone reading this with the same issue should contact Apple Support so they can have as much information as possible to fix this, in addition to making sure this gets resolved soon enough. They asked me to provide screenshots during the online chat portion, and over the phone they requested me to turn off my VPN (it didn't do anything), turn off and back on iCloud optimization (it didn't do anything), and boot into safe mode (it didn't do anything). They also wanted me to reinstall macOS but I made it clear that wasn't going to happen, and also that in another thread people already tried that in relation to corespotlightd to mixed results.

To do exactly what I did, go to Apple's website. Click Support on the right side of the screen. Scroll down to the section that says "Get Support" (it's quite large with a black button stating "Start Now" and a Memoji underneath). Under "View your products" click "Choose a product". Select your Mac. Click More. Scroll down and click Storage. Click continue. It should give you an option for a call or a chat. I originally opened a chat and clarified immediately what my actual issue was. When she eventually asked me reinstall the OS, I made it clear that I didn't actually expect a fix for this over Support, I simply wanted to get this issue to reach the attention of the people at Apple that could actually get this patched. So she scheduled a phone call for me with her seniors for several hours later at my convenience. (I contacted Support at like 3AM, if you chat with them during normal waking hours you'll likely get a scheduled call much sooner I'm assuming.)

The person I spoke to wouldn't add my case to their file unless I tried booting in Safe Mode to see if the issue was still present, so be prepared for that, or potentially anything else disruptive for them to give your case validity. If you start with a chat that moves to the phone then also have your case number ready because the person on the phone won't have access to your chat log otherwise. The person I spoke to was fantastic so I wouldn't worry about dealing with typical poor customer service like you would from other companies. The call happened 5 minutes after the scheduled time and the chat representative showed up almost immediately.

tl;dr — trash your ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder

I haven't had a problem since 11 February, when I was running macOS Sequoia 15.3. Then today, I noticed a lag when typing into a Pages document and then a spinning beachball when poking around in a Finder window. I fired up the Activity Monitor; corespotlightd was back to it's old tricks.

macOS Sequoia 15.4.1

Folder/File Sizes:

• /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100 does NOT exist
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight at 62.45 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents at 7.4 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication folder at 27.92 GB
• ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/Priority folder at 26.79 GB
• ~/Library/Caches at 1.85 GB

I do not believe “Optimize Storage” is turned on

Disk Writing:

• kernel_task had written 4.96 TB
• mds_stores had written 3.10 GB
• launchd had written 440.20 GB
• backupd had written 25.19 GB
• corespotlightd had written 47.46 GB

Steps to Fix (which is only temporary but not onerous)

12:59 PM —

• corespotlightd using >300% CPU
• Pages using 23.1% CPU with two small files open
• “Data written/sec” was typically sitting at around 180 MB

1:02 PM — trashed the ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder

1:04 PM — 

• corespotlightd down to 2.5%
• Pages down to <10%
• “Data written/sec” is typically staying <1 MB

1:22 PM — com.apple.podcast.SpotlightIndexExtension at 99.6% CPU

1:44 PM — at some point before this time, com.apple.podcast.SpotlightIndexExtension at 0% CPU

I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this listing, as it would have been impossible to resolve my sequoia/spotlight issue without all of your help. There appear to be two simple actions to eliminate the runaway spotlightd process.

• • Empty the contents of the ~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight folder
  • Download the contents of the "pages" and "numbers" folders on iCloudDrive onto your computer

NOTE: It has only been two hours since the problem was resolved, but I am confident that it is gone.

I hope you find this useful.

Mitch Stone wrote:

The wide variation of experience with this bug is vexing.

To put it mildly. In my case (which seems to be similar to some people's experiences and wildly dissimilar to others'), I can avoid issues with CPU overload and a host of other problems, including Spotlight search, smart folders in Apple Mail, Time Machine, just to list a few, by the simple expedient of emptying the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight folder on a regular basis (at least on Intel systems; the two Apple Silicon systems I own seem to do their own trash collection, as it were).

But "regular" has seemed to become a shorter and shorter period of late. Example: I emptied the above folder around eight o'clock this morning on my iMac Pro, before going to work. It had been just short of 40 GB before I emptied it. I happened to stop home about two and a half hours later, and the folder had already grown to nearly 30 GB. That's with no iWork apps open at all: not Pages, not Numbers, not Keynote. Which you would think would falsify my own hypothesis about how heavily-edited Pages files, at least, contribute to exacerbating if not actually causing the problem.

And across the room, I've had a large (>55 MB), heavily-edited Pages file open for two days straight on my Mac Studio (while it was also being edited on other systems). At the beginning of that period, CoreSpotlight was at about 27 GB. But after a day, it was down to 9.7 GB (apparently some process is doing what it is likely supposed to do, which is to delete out-of-date metadata). In the day since then, it's grown all the way to 9.72 GB.

If nothing else, these observations support the contention that this issue is much more severe on Intel systems than on Apple Silicon systems. But others with M-series Macs have problems as or more severe than what I experience on my Intel systems, so…who knows?

It would be nice if Apple could ultimately resolve this issue, but given how exasperatingly difficult it has been to even diagnose what reliably causes the problem, I'm not optimistic.