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

Mar 16, 2025 8:27 AM in response to Daniel_145

Daniel_145 wrote:

What would you recommend, please? Reboots don't help, killing the spotlightd process in Activity Monitor helps only for a few minutes. Closing the Pages app helps but unfortunately I really need the document, it's the only reason why I didn't buy a pen and paper instead

Delete the contents of the ~/library/metadata/coresporlight/ folder. This has worked for multiple users including myself.

It's a temporary fix, in that eventually that folder will grow to the size you're seeing now. But I just see it as maintenance. Every couple of weeks I delete that data.

KWiPod

Level 2

152 points

Apr 2, 2025 12:23 AM in response to KWiPod

Since updating to MacOS Sequoia 15.4 (24E248) on Monday March 31st, all the spiking issues I described have stopped. Fingers crossed !

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

May 13, 2025 1:52 PM in response to LAWM0N

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. Either way, the Spotlight data is stored locally, and it is the size and/or complexity of this data that seemingly causes the process to freak out.

LAWM0N wrote:

Are you saying 'do not use iCloudDrive for Pages or Numbers?' Ever? Or just do not use past contents (after downloading past contents onto your computer, but OK to use from now on?

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Oct 25, 2025 12:06 AM in response to dar221

I have had little to add to this discussion for a while, as this issue seemed to go away for me. Then, recently, I began working on a new Pages document. It isn't a particularly large document (around 10k words) stored in iCloud. I had been writing and editing it for several weeks, leaving it open for days at a time, without any apparent issues. Then I shared it for collaboration, with tracking changed turned on. Almost immediately after my collaborator began editing, the corespotlightd process shot up. So for me, at least, it is clearly not an iCloud issue per se. Shortly after closing the document, the process settles back down.

I also found a feature in Activity Monitor that I had not noticed before (possibly it is new in Tahoe). Double-clicking on the CPU pane brings up a window illustrating the CPU load per core. I have no idea of how to interpret this graph, or why all of the cores are labeled "Performance" except 1-4 and 13-16, which are labeled "Efficiency." In any case this is the graph from when the corespotlightd process exceeded 100%. A lot of red bars. Otherwise they are mostly green, and it seems even under this load, half of the cores are not in use at all.

Shared here in the hopes that someone will understand what this means.

Jan 7, 2025 6:07 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Hi, Mitch. After talking with Apple Support, I discovered I had a different problem. I'm a bit embarrassed about it. Router performance is basic 101 troubleshooting and I failed to speed test the router as part of looking into continued lags and spinning wheels after I had turned off Apple Intelligence (which successfully addressed corespotlightd hogging the CPU). I ran a speed test and it showed my router was running at an upload speed of 2.61, dreadfully slow, especially when working with large documents on iCloud (where all my Pages documents reside). Also, there's several discussions out there regarding how quickly we can upload documents to iCloud, which might cause delays and even spinning wheels while editing large documents, like the Pages documents I've been working with. So, I'll need to decide if I want to fork out $50 a month to increase my upload speed or just move my large Pages docs to my computer and back them up to my external drive. >>sigh<<

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Jan 28, 2025 8:41 AM in response to ericmurphysf

Interesting. Checking these folders on my M2, I find that the size of the CoreSpotlight folder is 37GB, but no file within it is even a megabyte in size. The SpotlightKnowlegeEvents folder clocks in at 463 MB. It contains far more subfolders, so it is difficult to figure out where this data is hiding. Has your performance been improved by deleting the contents of these folders?

And another FWIW: Since the last time I deleted the Spotlight plist about a week ago, I have had no corespotlightd process issues. So I do think this is worth trying.

ericmurphysf wrote:

I'm not sure how many other people with this issue have seen degraded Spotlight results (including in Mail) as a result of corespotlightd's misbehavior, but I managed to at least temporarily resolve some of these issues by, on the advise (or at least consent) of Apple support, deleting the contents of the two folders, CoreSpotlight and SpotlightKnowledgeEvents, from ~/library/metadata/.

Note that I deleted the contents of these two folders, not the folders themselves. Also note that on Apple Silicon systems the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder is inside the CoreSpotlight folder. On Intel systems, it's at the root of ~/library metadata.

However, deleting the contents of these folders (on my system those contents comprised over half a terabyte of data) did not permanently resolve the issue. In barely twelve hours Spotlight added 22 GB of new metadata to these two folders. But I think until Apple resolves this issue (I doubt it will be in 15.3), simply deleting the contents of these folders when they get over a couple of hundred GB will definitely improve system performance, especially search.

Also note that in my experience these issues are less serious on Apple Silicon Macs. On my M2 Max MBP and my M1 Ultra Mac Studio, these folders are large but not enormous; 40 GB on the first system and 18GB on the second one.

Feb 3, 2025 4:05 PM in response to CaptainJoy

CaptainJoy wrote:

ericmurphysf asked:

How heavy a user of Pages are you?

I use Pages all the time. As a rule, I always have at least one Pages document open, and often one or more are >10 MB.

I suspect this is the root of the problem. I don't know if the amount of metadata accumulated on your system is comparable to mine, but for the last quarter of last year I was editing at least one file (on multiple Macs) that by that time had grown to ~200 MB (roughly 1,200 pages with many embedded graphics), and I'm pretty certain the result was half a terabyte of metadata saved in my user library folder. I strongly suspect a consequence of that amount of metadata was system instability, major issues with Time Machine backups, and degraded search performance in Spotlight to the point of unusability.

Since deleting this metadata last week, all three of these issues have resolved. The one remaining issue is that metadata continues to accumulate at an alarming rate, which will likely force me to remove it just as I did the last time, probably within the next two months. I'm pretty sure this is a bug somewhere in Apple's code that will need to be resolved via a future macOS update.

Feb 9, 2025 4:18 PM in response to Bets

Bets wrote:

Still concerned about just deleting the Corespotlightd file - but at least I've found it. Thanks for the discussion - I hope Apple does something about it. perhaps modify Pages somehow.

I haven't yet had occasion to delete the CoreSpotlight folder on an M-series system yet, but I've deleted all the Spotlight-related folders' contents (while leaving the folders themselves in place) on Intel systems, and have seen no ill effects.

If you want to be super-careful on an M-series system I would recommend you open the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight folder on an Apple Silicon system, and delete all the contents except for the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder. Then, when everything else has been deleted, open the SpotlightKnowledgeEvents folder and delete its contents.

This is probably a belt-and-suspenders approach; other users have simply deleted the entire Corespotlight folder without ill effects.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Feb 9, 2025 4:19 PM in response to fronesis47

I don't think we know how large this folder is supposed to be, and I can attest to the fact that no process is taking over the CPU with the folder containing this much data. FWIW, I left the large Pages file open for several hours with no change in the amount of data being stored or any processes running amok, at least that I was able to witness. My issues with this process hogging the CPU seem ridiculously random. When I started this discussion, my Mac became essentially unusable within 5-10 minutes after one large Pages file was opened. Same file now, not nearly as much of a problem. All I have attempted as mitigation is trashing the spotlight plist.

fronesis47 wrote:

Mitch Stone wrote:

Earlier in this discussion it was established that iCloud is not the culprit. Files that will trigger the problem will do so whether they are stored locally or in iCloud. I meant corespotlightd because this the process I see as being hyperactive when the CPU is overloaded. Either way I have had this large Pages file open for over an hour now and the file has not grown at all. Unfortunately all of the theories we've come up with so far are incomplete or flawed. They only seem to work for some users some of the time.

I realize iCloud is not the cause per se (because the problem has been reproduced with Pages files that are not on iCloud Drive). I'm curious about exploring the possibility that the problem is worse without the optimize function on. It seems to me that with my two machines, there's just much slower growth of the folder on the machine with optimize on.

I'll also add: I'm not sure your case completely disproves the general thesis. 60Gb is a really large metadata file. It's already at the point that corespotlightd is taking over the CPU. So by this point it doesn't really matter that the folder has stopped (or significantly) slowed its growth; it's already a problem. And I guess I have to assume that the folder got that big for the same reasons as everyone else. If you could delete your folder, and then open a pages file and have the folder not grow – that would be a totally different data point.

Now that I've been deleting my metadata folder (as an experiment) I have absolutely zero issues with corespotlightd. If the corespotlight folder is smaller than 10Gb I find I never have any slowdowns at all.

Feb 10, 2025 11:51 AM in response to sugarskyline

If there's anything we can say about different users' reports of their experiences with this bug, it's that it manifests very differently on different users' computers. But the one common thread appears to be the problem is most severe when you've got a Pages file open (and it doesn't seem to matter how large that file is or even if it's being edited).

That said, I have observed oddities like today, where I've had a 15 MB Pages file open for three hours that I've been actively editing, and have seen metadata increase from about 11 GB (after I'd deleted all Spotlight metadata last night) to 13 GB, but over the weekend had a single 145 kB Pages file open with no edits being made to it, which apparently took Spotlight metadata from 63 GB to over 120 GB.

I suspect that the larger these metadata files are, the faster they grow in absolute terms. It's almost like compound interest. 10 GB of metadata might increase by 20% a day, but 60 GB might increase by more like 50% or more a day.

Zenith

Level 1

15 points

Feb 25, 2025 11:31 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Just to increment the anecdata.

I have this problem, new MBA (M3), 1TB drive, 16GB rams.

In frustration, I both rage quit pages and deleted metadata/corespotlight folder. Problem went away. I had half dozen pages files open, all <3MB, nothing but text. I launched pages with one file, 6000 word outline. Everything awesome for about 14 hours. Then corespotlight up and running nonstop for like 4-5 hours. Rage-quit pages again. A flurry of activity, then cpu died down, corespotlightd not in the top 20 in activity monitor.

Sent feedback via assistant to Apple, reported here. Problem does seem pages related, which is sad, because I was growing very familiar with and fond of pages over Word. Apple! Please Fix!

rage-quit means right clicking dock icon->quit while cursing loudly.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Feb 26, 2025 4:22 PM in response to SBML

I am beginning to like this theory a lot. I am currently working with a Finder-duplicated version of the large Pages document that previously caused CoreSpotlightd process issues. I've left it open most of the day, editing it only lightly. During this time, I've seen the process ramp up a few times, but never go nuts and take over the CPU as it did before -- and before long, it always settles down. So rather than deleting the metadata, it seems the quicker and less disruptive solution is duplicating a Pages files that is causing CPU overloads and working with the copy. In my case I have not deleted the original, so this part of the exercise seems to be unnecessary.

SBML wrote:

That's enlightening. If you duplicate the Pages doc and delete the original then you lose the versioning options. Does that reduce the metadata?

Feb 28, 2025 9:29 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Mitch Stone wrote:

The inconsistency of this problem from day to day and Mac to Mac is crazy. I am presently not experiencing it on my M2 Ultra Studio. I never experienced it on my M1 MBA, even when opening the same Pages file on it as on the Studio. All this said, I am not convinced that preference files are not implicated, because the OS writes to some them, including the spotlight plist file. I suppose if this bug was a simple one Apple would have fixed it already.

The most bizarre thing that has happened to me so far in this whole misadventure was that before I determined that it was permissible to delete CoreSpotlight metadata without e.g. ending up with an un-bootable system, I was contending with multiple Time Machine issues, kernel panics, temporary system lockups (especially during video playback), and corespotlightd pinning the CPUs on my M1 Ultra Mac Studio (pinning the CPUs on a system like that is no easy task). Okay, that's what many people on this thread have reported. But here's where it gets weird:

I have never deleted Spotlight metadata on this system. That metadata has never exceeded about 40 GB, which in my months-long experience is not generally enough to precipitate these kinds of issues, at least, not on any of the Macs I own. But, after I deleted enormous quantities (> 500 GB) of Spotlight metadata on two other Macs (my iMac Pro and my 27-inch iMac), the problems I was experiencing on my Mac Studio literally disappeared, never (or at least not yet, a month later) to reappear.

I cannot account for why this would be, other than that all three systems (and my MBP) are all on the same iCloud account, and all four have iCloud sync turned on for, among other things, Pages.

Is this just a lucky coincidence? I'm leaning in that direction. But the timing is certainly suggestive of, well…something.

Apr 28, 2025 6:04 AM in response to ericmurphysf

ericmurphysf wrote:

If anything 15.4 seems to have worsened the problem of extremely rapid buildup of Spotlight metadata.

Me too. My metadata folder had stayed between 2 and 10 Gb for months. With 15.4.1 I'm over 30Gb.

The next experiment will be to quit Pages for a while and see if metadata comes down in size.

Also bad news here, for me. Prior to 15.4 the folder would shrink quickly after I closed all Pages files. Now it's stubbornly stuck about 30Gb.

May 13, 2025 2:43 PM in response to Mitch Stone

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.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues