Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Mitch Stone wrote:

Just to be clear, everything we suggest here can be nothing more than a Band-Aid. Only Apple can provide the fix. We are told Apple engineering is monitoring this discussion, so any real-world experiences we can document, and anything that works even as a temporary solution, not only helps us manage the problem in the short term, but perhaps will also point Apple towards the permanent solution we all want.

All this said, based on the now 12(!) pages of discussion since I started this thread, I have become convinced that the problem is Spotlight trying to index documents with a large number of edits. This is exactly how it manifested for me, with an 80k word Pages document being edited by two people with Track Changes turned on. Between us, this resulted in probably more than a thousand edits. Towards the end of the editing, I was seeing beach balling every time I opened this document for more than a few minutes at a time, and had one kernel panic.

Once this editing process was completed, I Finder copied the document. I can now open and make additional edits to the copy without incident. If I watch Activity Monitor (I leave it open in Stage Manager with corespotlightd selected), I will see some spikes in the process, but they are not nearly as high or as prolonged as before, and I also don't see any beach balls. To me, this proves the theory pretty conclusively.

Just to add to Mitch's experiences: I am an inveterate journal-keeper, writing in Pages on a daily basis. It needn't be emphasized that a daily journal grows over time, and by the last couple of months of the year, my Pages journal file is typically over a thousand pages, 750k words or more, which with dozens of embedded graphics will result in a file size between 200–300 MB. Moreover, after nearly a year, we're talking literally tens of thousands of edits. When I was first researching this issue at the beginning of this year, I discovered that my Spotlight metadata had increased on two Intel systems to over 500 GB each. On both machines, Time Machine had essentially ground to a halt, Spotlight search results were useless, both systems suffered multiple kernel panics, and corespotlightd would sometimes pin all CPU cores on both systems, using as much as 1400% of CPU time spread across all sixteen cores (eight of which are virtual hyperthreading cores).

For me, deleting Corespotlight metadata resolved all of these issues. Not permanently; I have to weed out the metadata folders every week to ten days. But so long as I keep that metadata below ~50 GB (on relatively high-performance systems with lots of storage space), my computer life remains pretty peaceful. So long as I remember to quit Pages when I'm not actually using it.

But that said, I was editing my journal file last night, and with that one file open in Pages, which is about 18.5 MB, I watched Spotlight metadata grow by literally a megabyte per second or more, for as long as the file was open. In a single day that would add thousands if not tens of thousands of MB of metadata. But as soon as I quit Pages, metadata growth stopped in its tracks, and was the same value this morning before I left for work, twelve hours later.

YMMV, obviously, but for me these kinds of results could not be more dispositive of the problem here: Spotlight coupled with Pages files with many edits.

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.

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.

ahernk1 wrote:

I totally disagree. There is a strong inverse correlation between the size of the metadata file and performance of the computer. Whether it is a cause or effect is unknown, but there is definitely a relationship.

It's possible there are a variety of things going on here, which manifest differently on different systems.

But at least on the 3 Macs in my household, I can say confidently that the out-of-control corespotlightd process is definitely not the cause of the large metadata folder. The only causality is the other way around: the metadata folder grows in size, and that is the (or a) root cause of corespotlightd running amok. I can say this because the corspotlightd process NEVER runs out of control when the metadata folder is under 25Gb.

This is also a very plausible hypothesis to work with: the larger that metadata database, the more work the corespotlightd process has to do.

Mitch Stone wrote

So my completely practical advice for those who want to get on with their work is to not assume you have a problem unless you have the problem. If you have the problem, then try the variously suggested solutions. Attacking this the other way around is not doing yourself any favors. Or to put this in a familiar way, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Again, I totally agree that there's no reason for individual end users to waste time solving this problem; users should do what they need to do to keep the corespotlightd process from going crazy.

However, something is broken here, and Apple should fix it.

I just recently updated to Sequoia, am now on 15.4.1, and am getting the spinning wheel constantly to the point of it lagging with anything I do. The Activity Monitor showed that "corespotlightd" hogging up CPU, and I found this thread, and thankfully deleting the Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder worked... For a few hours or so, until that folder got all the way up close to 1GB! (from around 35MB)

So it's now May 2025, is Apple planning on a fix? Or did they just give up on Sequoia?

I've had a similar issue on my M1 Mac Mini, Sequoia 15.4.1 with freeze-ups every couple of minutes lasting 5-10 seconds. The Disk appeared to freeze for this period, unresponsive mouse (but the keyboard would work) followed by a massive surge in write outs and high activity on Kernel_Task and Corespotlightd.

I think I've fixed the issue thanks to several comments on this and other threads pointing towards problems with Pages.

I have recently produces a large document containing HEIC photos transferred to my Downloads folder which I have deleted and then emptied the Trash and the problem has completely gone away.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me and I hope my addition helps someone else.

Switched to MS Word, problem solved.

I really wanted to use an Apple native tool for word processing, but the inability or unwillingness to actually do something about this issue over the 3 months since initial identification, has forced me back to the other side. Let me know when it is finally fixed and maybe I'll come back.

Not to be too much of a wet blanket, but this does not appear to me to be a solved problem, at least on Intel Macs (where the problem was always way more severe in my experience). I deleted Spotlight metadata yesterday on my Intel iMac and it's already 35 GB. I've had a large Pages document open all day which is presumably why, but if I have to close a word processing document in order to prevent the OS from filling my entire SSD up, it's not a solved problem.

In my last post [April 3rd 2025], I noted that all the corespotlightd and kernal_task spiking had stopped after updating my M4 MacBook Air [10c/24GB/1TB] to Sequoia 15.4 (24E248).

I updated to Sequoia 15.5 (24F74) on May 12th and all remained well . . . until, unfortunately, today.

I am struggling to complete this post with frequent appearances of the SBBoD caused, AM confirms, by corespotlightd which is showing crazing spiking numbers like 375%! I paid a visit to System Settings/Spotlight and removed and re-added my MBA SSD to force a re-index. After re-indexing was complete, all seemed to be well but then, but once I opened Pages (and Keynote), corespotlightd spiked once again.

Unbelievably as I write this, all the spiking just stopped ... for quite 15 minutes . . . but it started up again and, after 15 minutes, it's still spiking [corespotlightd currently = 178%].

My Mac becomes effectively unusable when in spike city. I really hope that Apple is monitoring this thread.