Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

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Level 2

300 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

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Answer 1

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

May 30, 2025 01:52 PM in response to KWiPod

We've seen no hard evidence that the issue is hardware-specific, though perhaps some anecdotal evidence that it is more of a problem with Intel-based systems. I have seen it on my M2 Ultra Studio but not on my M1 iMac and MBA.
It was established quite a while ago that this is not an iCloud issue, at least not as such. When I first reported this issue, the most consistent "trigger" file was a large, heavily edited Pages document stored in iCloud. I tried moving it to a local drive. No improvement. I did get some relief by making a Finder copy of the document and working with it instead. Others find that deleting the metadata files for Spotlight periodically helps, at least temporarily. The instructions for this can be found in the thread somewhere (sorry it's gotten so long!).

All this said, I no longer have this issue. I cannot explain precisely why, but the document that caused it so reliably before can now be left open all day long without any noticeable system performance degradation. Maybe it was because I made the Finder copy, maybe not. I can't recall if anyone else said this helped in their situation. It is based on the theory that Pages keeps track of every version of your edited document, which Spotlight then attempts to index, and making a Finder copy starts the versioning process from scratch. Worth a try, I think.

My feeling after hearing so many varying experiences with this issue (and having them come and go myself) is that it is not so much app-specific or system-specific, as it is document-specific. But I can't prove that either.

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Answer 2

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

Dec 29, 2024 04:20 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Was trying to solve this issue and happened to notice the setting below. Help Apple Improve Search in the Spotlight options.

I don't have any recollection of letting Apple improve search! Disabled. And found spotlightcored dropped to effectively zero CPU!

No idea if this will remain the case. But seems worth a go if it is selected on your machine.

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Answer 3

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

Dec 29, 2024 05:40 AM in response to PolyRod

Was trying to solve this issue and happened to notice the setting below. Help Apple Improve Search in the Spotlight options.

I don't have any recollection of letting Apple improve search! Disabled. And found spotlightcored dropped to effectively zero CPU!

No idea if this will remain the case. But seems worth a go if it is selected on your machine.

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Answer 4

RThomas

Level 1

15 points

Jan 18, 2025 01:31 PM in response to Mitch Stone

First - me too - started when I updated to Sequoia 15.2.

I'm on an M1 Mac mini. The problem started with pages - which I use extensively with very large docs. I have fiber internet, and consistently get 900+ kpbs up and down.

It began with lags on my mouse and keyboard - just in pages, and spread to all apple apps, and then all apps.

Force quitting corespotlightd and restart worked for a bit. Then it came back - quicker and quicker.

Tried deleting some, then all of the spotlight activities - which worked for a bit.

Additionally tried completely turning off Siri and Apple Intelligence.

It worked for about 30 minutes. And now it's back.

Has anyone found ANYTHING that actually works?

-- update - now this process has taken over the processing suck

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Answer 5

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 21, 2024 02:05 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Some additional information to report after a couple more days of exploring. On my Mac Studio, this issue is produced reliably by opening a large (20mb+) Pages file. This file also happens to be stored in iCloud and is shared for collaboration, though I don't know if this is a factor. Within around five minutes of opening this file, the corespotlightd process spikes, and it remains out of control for at least 10-20 minutes after closing the file. Eventually it settles down. I have not been able to reproduce this behavior with any other document or app. Opening this same document on my MacBook Air does not cause the process to run wild.

I decided to locate and remove the Spotlight preference file: com.apple.MobileAsset.SpotlightResources.plist

In Sequoia it is found in the directory Users/yourusername/Library/Metadata/Assets. By default this is a hidden directory that can be made visible by typing command-shift-period in the Finder. Once you have revealed the hidden directories you can easily search for the file in Spotlight (assuming it is working for you), or follow this path. Control-click on the file and select Move to Trash from the popup menu. Restart your Mac. A new Spotlight preference file will be created on startup. Note that if you previously set any volumes (such as external drives) to be excluded from Spotlight indexing, they will be added back in by default. You can change this in your Spotlight settings. Re-hide the hidden directories by typing command-shift period again.

I'm not sure if this solution completely cured my problem, but so far it sure has helped. The process does not spike up as quickly and it returns to a background state far more quickly than before after the Pages document is closed.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else tries this and gets results, positive or negative.

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Answer 6

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 27, 2024 08:39 AM in response to SBML

Thanks for the response. It seems your experience is similar, if also different in interesting ways. I've since found that my large Pages document still causes the process to spike up, but not as quickly as before, and since deleting the plist file for Spotlight, it resolves more quickly when the document is closed. The document is not password protected, so I don't think this is the source of the problem (as least, not by itself). My next step is to make a copy of this document and see if it causes the issue when it is or isn't shared or stored in iCloud. I suspect this is the commonality.

I didn't save the kernel panic report my Mac sent to Apple, but it also ID'd the corespotlightd process. This is what sent me looking at Activity Monitor.

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Answer 7

MgS_2012

Level 1

38 points

Dec 27, 2024 12:14 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Hmmm - okay - I'm seeing the same behaviour, but instead of with large documents (mine are sizeable, but not huge), but with _NUMBER_ of documents being accessed.

In my context, I have 8-10 documents open at any one moment (all on iCloud), and an additional 5-20 PDFs opened in Preview.

I did a reinstall of MacOS about 2 weeks ago after this problem cascaded into spontaneous crash-and-restarts even while the machine was otherwise idle (all documents closed), and I was in the midst of a lengthy video call when it decided to crash. (I also saw multiple spontaneous reboots happening overnight when the machine was otherwise idle).

Regarding re-install of MacOS, when I ran Disk Utility from Recovery Mode, it identified a ton of mismatch counts and other filesystem errors that it was unable to repair. At that point, I decided to do a nuke-and-pave, with the computer behaving itself until today when I see corespotlightd chewing CPU like candy again. (It wasn't even appearing in the list for top prior to today).

If the suspicions mentioned above are true, then this appears to be an indexing problem with the interaction between Spotlight and iCloud. (I'm reaching here, but iCloud indexing looks like a common denominator)

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Answer 8

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 27, 2024 01:36 PM in response to MgS_2012

I am seeing the issue being triggered with documents stored either locally or in iCloud, so it seems to me iCloud is off the top suspects list. You don't say if the large documents you have open are Pages documents or something else. It would he helpful if you could be more specific. Also, have you tried deleting the plist, as I suggested?

FWIW, I opened a very large TIFF file in Pixelmator and left it open for some time without any issues. Not a lot of surprise there since this file type is one that presumably Spotlight does not attempt to index.

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Answer 9

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

Dec 29, 2024 03:58 AM in response to Mitch Stone

I am using an M4 mini with 24GB. In the past few days, I've seen corespotlightd running at somewhere around 140% CPU. At best, it drops to about 80%. And I've just checked and seen it at 38.5% - which is the lowest I've seen in days - but moments later bounced back to 132% and remained high. CPU Time 1:07:06.22 despite restarting late last night.

And have started to get beachballs. And stutters - in Pages, in Numbers, in Excel, in Firefox, moving mouse, and other apps.

I have an M1 MBP which, so far, has not suffered this. Yet I edit the same files, which are in iCloud.

Dismounting all my external drives does not help noticeably.

My Pages documents vary from trivial to substantial. And the CPU usage persists even when I quit Pages, and Numbers, and Excel, and Word, almost everything.

It had been running fantastically. That makes it extremely disappointing.

All software is, to the best of my knowledge, bang up to date - and no beta versions/releases.

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Answer 10

MgS_2012

Level 1

38 points

Dec 29, 2024 12:02 PM in response to PolyRod

Very similar to my experience.

Timing-wise, it corresponds with the release of the Apple Intelligence software (that's when I started noticing some odd behaviour). I temporarily have disabled Apple Intelligence to see if it catches up and settles down with it disabled (I'm not overly optimistic about that). At the moment I'm watching corespotlightd running up to a peak of 152% CPU, and then going gradually to a low of 18%.

Like yourself, Apple Intelligence I have an M1 MBP that is behaving just fine (but Apple Intelligence is disabled on that machine because apparently it's not available with "English - Canada" selected as a language).

About 2 weeks ago, before I did a re-install of MacOS, I ran Disk Utility from within Recovery, and it spewed a ton of index count errors - don't remember the specific text, but they were all the same, and all clearly some kind of "off-by-one" counting error.

It is marginally possible that I have a failing SSD in the machine, but that seems unlikely.

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Answer 11

MgS_2012

Level 1

38 points

Dec 29, 2024 12:22 PM in response to Mitch Stone

%CPU is a bit of an odd duck in today's world of multi-core processors. It made more sense when we were doing things on single-core architectures like the VAX (yes, I'm that old). Back then a process chewing large amounts of CPU was pretty obvious. In a multi-core architecture, a process can simply get allocated to a different core when it gets switched out, resulting in the appearance of using "more than 100%" of a CPU. (The core allocation logic is opaque to most human beings - and I'm not exactly sure what the kernel / hardware interaction looks like there - it's been a few moons since I did any amount of kernel work)

Top in its default form is a bit aggressive, resampling every second. I tend to use the command "top -o CPU -s 5" to make it a little less hungry.

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Answer 12

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 29, 2024 01:12 PM in response to MgS_2012

Older versions of Activity Monitor showed each processor core graphically in the Dock icon individually. It is now shown as one, I presume because our current processors have too many cores to depict. I'm still struggling with how a processor showing 80+% idle can be saturated.

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Answer 13

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 30, 2024 11:22 AM in response to SBML

Thanks for reporting a similar experience with large Pages files. In my case, the app doesn't need to sleep, the process cranks up after 10-15 minutes of active use, maybe a little longer. Closing the document causes it to return to normal background operation in seemingly the same timespan. By then app has self-quit, usually.

Curiously, deleting the Spotlight plist file does tame this behavior for better part of a day. Turning off the "help Apple" selection in the Spotlight settings as suggested by another user did as well. But this is not a sticky fix. The problem always returns, at least for me.

Not sure how to file a report with Apple, or which log files need to be submitted.

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Answer 14

MgS_2012

Level 1

38 points

Dec 30, 2024 01:37 PM in response to MgS_2012

Follow-up to my earlier observations:

Yesterday, after using my M1 MBP for several hours with no issues to do the same kind of document editing use-case that I had going before, I decided to turn off Apple Intelligence on my M3 iMac, and so far it although I do see corespotlightd occasionally spiking in CPU, it comes back down in a reasonable amount of time, and is not causing random freeze conditions, nor has it caused a CPU panic at this time.

I have a follow-up call with Apple Support tomorrow morning. (I started squawking about this with them last week when the problem resurfaced after a re-install of the OS).

Correlation? It seems concerningly probable that something to do with Apple Intelligence integration is related to this issue.

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Answer 15

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

300 points

Dec 31, 2024 11:19 PM in response to briantf

I make a practice of never typing anyone's suggested commands into Terminal without a complete explanation of what they do. If this one simply kills the process, this can be accomplished far more easily and safely in Activity Monitor.

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