Level 2

306 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

Top-ranking reply

ericmurphysf

Level 2

307 points

Posted on Jan 31, 2025 8:44 AM

Okay, I have a new hypothesis as to what's going on here with corespotlightd. This process is one of at least four that are responsible for macOS's Spotlight functionality. The three others are mds, mdworker, and md_stores. I cribbed the following descriptions of these three processes from the HowToGeek website:

The two processes [mds and mdworker] are part of Spotlight, the macOS search tool. The first, mds, stands for metadata server. This process manages the index used to give you quick search results. The second, mdworker, stands for metadata server worker. This does the hard work of actually indexing your files to make that quick searching possible.

And for md_stores, from the TechNewsToday site:

Mds_stores is the core indexing process of the macOS. On normal days, it usually takes up a noticeable [sic, probably should be un-noticeable] amount of CPU. However, when you reinstall your OS or add new files/directories, your system will automatically start to reindex these new databases, which sees the mds_stores CPU usage skyrocket.

The macOS Spotlight feature makes use of two processes for indexing the system database; mds and mds_stores. The mds (Metadata Server) process is responsible for tracking and recording files and folders in your operating system. md_stores then compiles and manages these mds metadata, which Spotlight later uses for searching certain documents within your OS.

So it may be that corespotlightd is in fact an unwitting victim of other processes' having gone awry. On my two Intel systems, by three months after installing macOS 15.0, metadata associated with Spotlight located at ~/library/metadata had reached half a terabyte on both systems. It sounds like this data was actually written out by either mdworker, mds_stores, or both. And then, corespotlightd has to wade through these gigabytes upon gigabytes of metadata to actually produce search results, and as that task gets harder and harder with more and more metadata being produced, eventually Spotlight search results (which includes search and smart folders through Mail) degrade to the point of uselessness.

While I haven't managed to halt the rapid growth of metadata on these two Intel systems (Apple Silicon Macs still have the issue but to a much milder degree), simply deleting the metadata out of the ~/library/metadata/Corespotlight and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (while leaving the folders themselves intact) resulted in a near-immediate improvement in three areas: greatly reduced use of storage space; vastly improved search results; and much lower processor utilization by corespotlightd.

As noted, this metadata still continues to pile up (especially if I have a large (>5 MB) Pages file open). But if I have to empty out these two folders once every few weeks until Apple resolves the issue, that's not the end of the world).

View in context

328 replies

May 13, 2025 2:50 PM in response to ericmurphysf

ericmurphysf wrote:

Mitch Stone wrote:

No evidence points to iCloud being implicated in this issue in any way whatsoever. Certain large Pages documents that have been extensively edited appear to be the most common trigger of this issue, and it is not dependent on them being stored locally or in the cloud.

From what I can tell, what triggers rapid accumulation of Spotlight data specifically with large Pages documents is the way macOS automatically does versioning of such documents. That versioning is not due to sync via iCloud; it's simply the design decision of allowing the user to revert to any prior version of the doc, or indeed copying data from earlier versions to the current version if e.g. you accidentally deleted a paragraph or section of a document.

My hypothesis (so far not confirmed by Apple) is that the rapid growth of Spotlight metadata is an artifact of the various daemons doing Spotlight indexing (md_worker, etc.) reindexing the entire document, rather than just newly-edited sections. This happens whether or not you have iCloud sync turned on.

I obviously can't confirm it either (we need apple for that), but in my many hours of troubleshooting this, I am always led to the conclusion that the above hypothesis is exactly right.

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

May 19, 2025 9:26 AM in response to Mitch Stone

I too have mentioned it happens due to Numbers. Having had lots of occurrences and problems when using Pages, I thought I had the same issue with Numbers. I made sure that neither Pages nor Numbers was running, I think I restarted, and as soon as I started using Numbers problems, started.

However, it might be limited - as in only some spreadsheets. I am doing lots of more-or-less "text database" work in Numbers - rather than calculating. Possibly in numeric/calculating Numbers sheets there isn't a problem? (Just wanted to say this so that others can check this before replying.)

slferris

Level 1

13 points

May 22, 2025 10:11 AM in response to Mitch Stone

I agree with Mitch Stone. I have experienced the corespotlightd overload on my Mac mini M4 OS 15.5. However, as long as I turn off Pages when I’m not using it, especially when working on a very long document, and the Mail.app as well, I’ve seen the Core Spotlight folder diminish from 30 GB to as low as 4 GB. It tends to grow again but never beyond 30 GB, at least so far. I have not turned off Apple Intelligence. Along with Mitch, I would not mess around any more with deleting Core Spotlight files and the like. My Mac runs smoothly and no longer overheats as long as I follow these precautions.

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

Jun 3, 2025 2:47 AM in response to KWiPod

I agree - think that there is indeed an iCloud link.

In particular, I have more recently been much more careful about making sure I do not have the same documents open on both my macOS machines.

That, combined with changes I suspect fed through in updates in the past few months, has improved my actual experience. I can work on my machines without beachballs appearing repeatedly.

Nonetheless, I think the CoreSpotlight folder has grown excessively. Over 44 GB for 3646 items in my M4 mini. And about half that for twice as many document on my M1 MBP.

A pain because I keep jumping between machines - one upstairs, one downstairs. For no positive reason - I tend to just use whichever is closest when I decide to do something. But this means I have to think about things and make sure I close Pages and Numbers when I stop actively working. Otherwise I likely start again on the other machine...

Feb 6, 2025 2:17 PM in response to Mitch Stone

I, too, have been suffering with this issue on 4 different Macs, and I've been testing a million different things. I've also read this entire thread. Just trying to add a few summaries here that specify what we know and don't know.

But before I do that, I just have to say that Apple's "sort by rank" default option is a nightmare: it just makes the thread seem like meaningless nonsense, even though so many here are trying hard to solve the problem together.

I think Eric Murphy has shown that the corespotlightd problem (cpu usage spiking) is itself an effect of the metadata folder blowing up.
This means that if you delete the metadata folder, you will receive temporary relief. Same thing goes for having spotlight reindex, and perhaps even turning off AI – these things are all temporary.
CaptainJoy raises a very important question: how many people having problems are working on systems with migrated data?
Second question: is anyone having problems with optimize iCloud Drive turned ON?

I have 2 M2 Pros that are having exactly the problems described here, both had migrated data at one point in the past, and both have optimize iCloud Drive turned OFF.

But I have an M3 MacBook Air that was set up this summer from scratch. It downloaded iCloud Drive data, but I migrated nothing. It has optimize iCloud Drive turned ON. That computer is the only one not having problems. The metadata folder is less than 5Gbs and while it's growing, it's very very slow.

My guess is that optimize iCloud Drive is not the underlying cause, it's just that with that turned on, spotlight has less to index and therefore makes less of a mess.

But I really wonder if anyone out there can replicate this problem on a brand new Mac without any migrated data???

Feb 8, 2025 12:06 PM in response to fronesis47

fronesis47 wrote:

The temporary workaround• is to regularly delete the metadata folders.

The temporary and still very much less than ideal "fix• " is to TURN OFF spotlight indexing.

Any real solution• here will require Apple to make some tweak to spotlight or Pages.

Replying to my own post to amend it: It looks to me like the temporary fix is NOT a fix at all. I just turned spotlight indexing OFF, then opened a pages file and watched the corespotlight metadata folder grow over 5Gb in less than an hour. Whatever process is writing to the metadata folder is not turned off when you turn off spotlight indexing.

This means the only options are to live with this, by occasionally deleting the metadata folders, deleting the .plist file, and perhaps turning indexing off and on – all while waiting and hoping that apple fixes the problem.

I agree with Mitch Stone: it would be good to know if other documents (such as Numbers files) cause the same problem, and to see what happens with a new user.

THANK YOU to sugarskyline for showing me how to change the default presentation of the message board.

Feb 10, 2025 7:40 AM in response to roysch53

roysch53 wrote:

Regarding the two large folders (NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication & Priority) under the ~Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder; I don't have "Advanced Data Protection" turned on, so how is it that the NSFile... folders exist - is this part of Apple Intelligence? The NSFile... folders do not exist on my Intel iMac, only on the M2 laptop.

Has anybody removed (or renamed) these large directories, turned AI off and restarted - I just wondered if they get recreated.

Also, has Apple Support shed any light as yet?

The folder structure for Spotlight metadata under ~/library/metadata differs greatly between Intel and Apple Silicon systems. I have yet to delete metadata from either of the Apple Silicon systems I own, but based on postings by others, it sounds like it's safe to delete the entire CoreSpotlight/ folder. After you delete these folders, macOS will recreate them after five or ten minutes, and then they'll start to grow again. But so long as I don't leave Pages files open when I'm not editing them, they don't grow nearly as quickly.

As for Apple Support: I've been dealing with them on this issue for the better part of a month now, and while they've been helpful, the only concrete information they've been able to provide so far is that it is safe to delete the Spotlight metadata folders. I've done Capture Data sessions on an Intel Mac and an Apple Silicon Mac, and also sent them a detailed email describing my research and findings thus far. Unfortunately, the last senior advisor I spoke to, the weekend before last, was going on vacation for a week. I'll follow up with him tomorrow and see if he has anything to add, although what I'd really like to hear is that the Spotlight team is working on a fix to be added to a future system software update.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Feb 10, 2025 8:50 AM in response to sugarskyline

Thank you so much for this report! Apple Tech Support can be excellent if you get your case escalated. Unfortunately you usually have to go through all the scripted solutions from the lower-level techs, even if you know these suggestions won't help, before they will escalate your case. Pointing them to this discussion I believe has more potential to see this problem addressed by Apple's software engineers than our filing additional reports with tech support (though I certainly won't discourage anyone who has the time from making one).

I hope the engineers, in addition to reading this discussion carefully, will google the problem. This is where I started my research into it, and found that complaints about the corespotlightd process going berserk date back to at least macOS Ventura. Something in the latest iterations of the OS seems to have made it quite a bit more common. But it is not new.

My next step was going to be following my own suggestion and creating a new user to see if the problem turns up there when opening the same Pages files that seems to trigger it on my admin user account. But as of a few days ago, the issue has mysteriously ceased on my system, so I have nothing to test against. But if it recurs this is what I will try next. In the meantime someone who is currently experiencing this issue could give it a go, in the interests of science.

sugarskyline wrote:

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.

Mar 6, 2025 11:38 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Mitch Stone wrote:

Did you try my suggestion? For me, it actually did help a lot. I'm not sure I understand the resistance to it, given the simplicity and apparent effectiveness. I'd really like to know if it works as well for others as it did for me.

Based on the totality of posts on this thread, it seems very likely that while using Pages is not the sole cause of corespotlightd (and Spotlight metadata) running amok, it seems to be possibly the largest contributor. So far, users seem to have had decent luck with one, two, or all three of the following:

Mitch's recommendation of duplicating a Pages file (thus removing versioning information, which seems to be what spikes corespotlightd activity and Spotlight metadata accumulation), and then making further edits to the duplicated version.
Removing Spotlight-related .plists.
Removing Corespotlight metadata from the ~/library/metadata folder(s)

None of these workarounds are permanent fixes. But they seem to buy at least temporary reprieve (I deleted Spotlight metadata yesterday afternoon, and right now the system fan is at 12%, system CPU usage is below 20%, and corespotlightd doesn't even appear in the top forty processes). If I have to delete metadata once a week or so (a task that takes all of ten seconds), that's a small price to pay for acceptable performance.

If you're running into performance issues, including Time Machine issues, I would recommend you try some or all of these fixes. Apple may or may not ever get around to addressing these issues (which seem to disproportionately affect Intel systems which are obviously not Apple's priorities these days). But these fixes, singly or in some combination, seem to work for a lot of people. I'd at least give them a try. None of them seem to have negative consequences, unless you're unusually dependent on versioning in Pages.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Mar 16, 2025 9:20 AM in response to Daniel_145

I've made this point often, including in this discussion. It seems someone will always chime in with a magical solution that involves typing a command string into Terminal, often without explaining what it actually does. Any Terminal command that begins with "sudo" (super-user do) is dangerous, especially if it includes "rm" (remove). Just don't!

This is a very lengthy discussion but I also highly recommend Finder copying the Pages document that is causing the problem for you and working with it instead of the original. This worked for me. You may also find you need to delete the metadata, but I can report I've never needed to take this measure, and the issue is now under control, at least. I always suggest trying the least destructive possible solution first.

Also, I believe the consensus is that iCloud is not the source of the issue. It seems to originate from Spotlight trying to index heavily edited Pages documents, whether they are local or cloud stored.

Daniel_145 wrote:

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.

KWiPod

Level 2

152 points

Jul 13, 2025 11:37 PM in response to KWiPod

Last week, I called Apple Support and described the corespotlightd issue on my 4-months-old M4 MacBook Air [MacOS 15.5]. An appointment was made with the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store.

At this appointment, I explained our Pages [v14.4] corespotlightd issue to a lovely chap and we ran the hardware check which passed, ruling out my machine. I showed the Genius this forum, and he arranged for next-level-up Apple Support to call me the next day.

On that call, I shared my screen and showed the (also lovely) support chap this forum. After creating a New User (to rule out a user-specific problem), I opened Activity Monitor, highlighted corespotlightd, created a Pages document and saved it to iCloud. After a few edits, corespotlightd spiked.

The support chap then consulted and I was put on to a new (equally lovely, even higher-up) support chap to whom I showed this forum. He wanted me to duplicate the problem whilst screen recording. Unfortunately, I was unable to duplicate the spiking so the he sent me an email that allows me to send him a screen recording of the issue, should I be able to get it to happen.

I have been trying each day to capture the problem, but have, so far, failed. I will keep trying every day.

So we know that several individuals in Apple’s support hierarchy are at least aware our corespotlightd spiking issue. How high in that hierarchy, I cannot say.

Perhaps, if a few more of us follow the Apple Support approach, we may be able to get this issue acknowledged and then solved.

Jan 1, 2025 8:46 AM in response to MgS_2012

Thanks for your posts! I have large Pages files on my M2 MB Air and Apple Intelligence turned on. Editing those docs is when I first noticed the problem that eventually led me to corespotlightd high CPU usage. I’m wondering if Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence is the culprit. I talked with Apple Support yesterday (NYE) and made it to the point in troubleshooting where we identified it as a User issue and not system wide. We progressed to a system re-install, which you already know doesn’t work. I’ll talk with Support again tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’ve turned off Apple Intelligence on my Mac to see if it will also calm down

briantf

Level 1

20 points

Jan 1, 2025 10:07 PM in response to briantf

This seems to be promising. Corespotlightd now at 0% while reindexing in progress .

Disable system integrity protection. Boot into recovery mode and access the terminal. Run csrutil disable
rm -rf ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight (the bloated files here contain the crux of the issue)
sudo mdutil -a -i off
Remove the spotlight index. rm -rf /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight*
sudo mdutil -a -i on
sudo mdutil -E
Follow step 1 but instead, run csrutil enable

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Feb 4, 2025 9:20 AM in response to ericmurphysf

This is certainly interesting, and I also had the inkling from watching the Activity Monitor that more than one process is implicated. However I do wonder why I've been able to mitigate this issue successfully by simply deleting the spotlight plist. My system has been behaving itself for the last couple of weeks since I did this last. I don't know if anyone tried this before moving on to more drastic measures.

ericmurphysf wrote:

Okay, I have a new hypothesis as to what's going on here with corespotlightd. This process is one of at least four that are responsible for macOS's Spotlight functionality. The three others are mds, mdworker, and md_stores. I cribbed the following descriptions of these three processes from the HowToGeek website:

Mar 9, 2025 9:37 PM in response to Mitch Stone

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.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues