Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

As long as I do not use Pages, all is fine with the CPU usage. There is some problem between Pages and OS that is doing this.

I checked Activity Monitor on my M2 MBA 8 hours after turning off Apple Intelligence and the CPU usage for corespotlightd was 0.0% !

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.

Firstly, thank you deeply to the person that made this thread and came to the realization about Pages. I was going crazy trying to research corespotlightd and having nothing work. Secondly, is this likely to be fixed with Sequoia 15.3? Finally, while I don't have much to add other than confirmations of what's already been said, I have noticed that corespotlightd will inevitably start to bug after a while no matter how small the document is. It simply takes longer. If I open my big document of hundreds of pages, it's immediately. But I've also had open files that are just 2 pages, and while everything remained calm for a while, after about 30 minutes it's back to acting up again, despite iCloud for Pages and Apple Intelligence being deactivated.

Also, before disabling any iCloud app sync I didn't need, I was also having major issues with several iCloud daemons (technically still am, just to a much lesser extent). This whole thing feels like an Apple Intelligence related screw up, where (for whatever reason) the system is wrongfully tasked with a process it cannot complete, or, it is unable to recognize the task has already been completed. I don't mean this as in Apple Intelligence the service itself, I mean regarding whatever software changes they made to the OS outside of Apple Intelligence in order to accommodate for it (if that makes sense).

I upgraded just a week ago from a base model M1 MacBook Air to an M4 Pro Macbook Pro and on that Air I didn't get to update to 15.2 because I was having issues getting the update to download properly, but I'm grateful, cause I never had any issues on that device related to Pages or iCloud. This M4 Pro came with 15.2 already installed, and I believe I had to update my iWork apps for the current version (which I regret). Whenever Pages is opened the fans will inevitably kick in (CPU increase), the battery drain is as severe as if I was using DaVinci Resolve, and the disk will write over 80mb every 10 or so seconds. Whenever I force quit corespotlightd it simply restarts extremely aggressively, writing over 100mb every second. At its absolute worst, before I found this thread and tried the remedies, I had lost over 60GB of storage space in just a couple hours (labeled as System Data). The disk write per 8-10 seconds was in the low hundreds.

Last thing worth noting, when I tried logging into my Apple ID during the initial setup for my M4 Pro (with Sequoia 15.2 already installed), I would get the rainbow wheel about 10 seconds after doing so. I would reach the screen for setting up the system and profile name, and then I'd get hit with the rainbow. This happened to me twice in a row before I decided to just skip logging into my Apple ID upon setup, and when I did that, the device setup went perfectly fine. Not sure if this is related, but considering all the iCloud issues I figured it's worth noting.

As an experiment, I left Pages running over the weekend on my work computer which was otherwise idle all weekend. The only Pages file open was a single document that's all of 145 kB. Nevertheless, the Spotlight metadata folders on this system have exploded since Friday evening, going from 63 GB to 123 GB. Otherwise the system seems to be running normally, with the CPUs at about 85% idle and corespotlightd nowhere to be seen in Activity Monitor (it's using about 3% CPU).

Nevertheless, having learned my lesson, the first thing I'll be doing when I get in to work tomorrow is simply deleting the metadata folders. I've done this three times before with no ill effects, it's completely resolved the Spotlight and Time Machine issues I've been having, and until Apple resolves this issues (assuming they ever do), it's a quick, easy, and relatively painless solution. Having to delete a couple of folders every few weeks doesn't seem that onerous, even if I have to do it indefinitely.

Have tried deleting part of metadata - the contents of NSFFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstAuthentication and Priority.

Since then, used Pages without obvious problems. And I purposely did lots and lots of edits all over. The Metadata did grow a bit - but then shrank when I closed Pages.

On my MBP, same folders are also larger than I would have expected (a bit over 20GB each of the above). But I've had hardly any issues on the MBP - had loads on the M4 mini.

But when I looked inside I found a very large number of files named journalAttr.<number>_toc.

And that just might correspond to my Pages issues. The documents which have always seemed to be the most sensitive to issues have significant and dense Tables of Contents.

I will keep looking.

I know I was on this thread some time ago then dropped it. Afraid personal issues got in the way of trying to get it resolved.

I have iMac 27" intel. I delete System Data related to Library>Metadata>"CoreSpotlight" and "Spotlight KnowledgeEvents" EVERY NIGHT (and delete from Trash, too), or I hit the 50GB threshold that affects pace of storage accumulation and performance significantly. Thanks to this Group for this bandage to keep operational.

My tech knowledge is maxed out at starting my lawnmower. Amazed that I found this group. Apple Support let me down badly. At year end, I began to get pop-ups about "Your system has run out of application memory." Apple support baffled. Ultimately they had me delete and refill MacOS and all data, which is still causing me grief. All for nothing. Sigh...

KWiPod wrote:

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

It's only been a few hours since I updated to 15.4, but so far the signs, at least on my Intel 27-inch iMac, are not encouraging. CoreSpotlightd isn't using much CPU time (7% on an 8-core system with hyperthreading turned on), but immediately after the update the (relocated) CoreSpotlight metadata was at around 2.6 GB (I'd deleted it all last night before the update to 15.4). It's now about two and a half hours later, and already metadata is up to 24.3 GB (with a large Pages file open). Before 15.4, after deleting metadata it would typically take closer to two days to get to 24 GB. If anything 15.4 seems to have worsened the problem of extremely rapid buildup of Spotlight metadata.

The next experiment will be to quit Pages for a while and see if metadata comes down in size. I've seen this many times on Apple Silicon systems, but the only way I've ever been able to reduce the size of Spotlight metadata on Intel systems is by manually deleting it.

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’ve had a few comments about other apps: in my experience, it is only Pages that causes the corespotlightd spike crisis. And It’s persistent and repeatable: 

• My Mac runs normally running all my other apps.

• I open a Pages document (even one isolated from Spotlight and that has been duplicated in the Finder) and corespotlightd spikes immediately.

• I quit Pages, and an after a time (seemingly dependent upon how long the Pages document was open), and corespotlightd calmes down . . . however, there is also a possibility (that's happened once since updating to 15.5) that quitting pages will not result in  corespotlightd calming down . . . and then the only way to calm down corespotlightd is to reinstall the OS.

I understand your frustration; this situation goes back at least to the earliest days of Sequoia, and there's anecdotal evidence that it might go all the way back to Ventura or earlier. But given the complexity of the issue, and the seemingly random nature of its symptoms and proposed fixes, I'm honestly not surprised Apple has been unable to resolve the issue. As my posts have noted, I have four Macs: two with Intel processors and two with Apple Silicon processors. In my experience the problem is much more pervasive and severe in the former.

I'm assuming you've read the posts on this thread, and have come across the proposed fix that seems to be reasonably successful: deleting CoreSpotlight metadata from the folder ~/library/metadata. I started removing this data on a regular basis more than six months ago, and almost immediately saw substantial performance gains on the various systems. Has that not been your experience?

Since I've kept Spotlight metadata below ~50 GB/system, I have not seen excessive CPU use by any of the various Spotlight-related processes: corespotlightd, mdworker, mds, etc. Nor I have I seen system freezes, unresponsiveness, or any similar symptoms. I've also seen improved performance in Spotlight search and even Time Machine.