Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

• I keep activity monitor open and handy all the time. Glad I have two large screens.
• Copying large page document to remove metadata has been helpful bandage, but no fix.
• I have not noticed spikes in Word (because I don't use it much and was not paying attention to Word). My Metadata accelerated its increase one day, and that might have been related to opening Word document. Not sure. I'll watch.
• I have noticed spikes, slow CPU when I make any changes in Apple Contacts, which is huge problem, because I use Apple Contacts often.

Mitch Stone wrote:

I will continue to recommend that we pay attention to real-world performance, rather than looking elsewhere for problems that may not actually be problems. The size of the metadata files may be related to the Spotlight bug in some way, but we don't have the technical information to know how

I agree with the basic sentiment here. The biggest issue is the slowdown caused by the corespotlight process running wild, not the size of the metadata folder. However,

1. While it's not confirmation from Apple engineers, we have a large pile of anecdotal data concerning the link between the two. My system has never experienced slowdowns when the metadata folder was at a reasonable size. Whenever my Mac's performance has been degraded, my metadata folder was huge.
2. At a certain point the size of the metadata folder itself becomes a "performance issue." For folks with a 256Gb SSD, it's not reasonable for MacOS to use up as much as half the drive (many people have reported that folder growing to over 100Gb) to store corespotlight metadata. This is a problem in itself.

I'm on a fast Mac (M4) and I use relatively small (less than 5Mb) Pages files, so it's rare that I have slowdowns. But that folder will sometimes reduce my available storage space from 240Gb down to as little as 50Gb. That's not right.

Having had a period of relatively little impact, I've had terrible issues this morning. Using Numbers seems to be the biggest issue. A sheet of 448 kb and pretty simple except for being a pivot table.

M4 mini freezing repeatedly. And Spotlight folder bigger than ever.

I did have a Pages file opened - but even closing that - and idle Excel and Word instances - did not fix the issue. Only closing Numbers - and waiting - got me out of the mire.

This ridiculous size is making my drive look rather full.

For other reasons, I looked at Console yesterday. And found clear evidence of Pages and Numbers issues. Which at least superficially match up with my experience of problems. (I haven't grovelled through for exact times, etc.)

Would be happy to let Apple have full logs/reports.

I have 370Mbs down and 94Mbs up. Pretty sure it's not a network problem. Also, I was seeing virtually no network activity when the processes were 'stuck'. I'm now two days into updating to 15.2 (build 24C101) on my 64Gb M4 Pro Mini and the issue had not reoccurred once. FYI, I also have an 2017 Intel iMac running OS 13.7.1 on the same network and that has not had any problems with corespotlightd or processes getting stuck during this time. I'm going to attach a photo (screenshot obviously not an option at the time) of the two Terminal windows I had open to see what was going on. You can see 27 stuck processes, mostly PPID 1 so child processes of launchd which was also stuck. Here endeth my google-assisted technical expertise, I'm just adding it in case it helps someone figure out what's been going on.

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.

@sugarskyline. Yes, I'm pretty sure I didn't have this problem with Pages and spotlight before Sequoia. It's completely out of control on 15.3.

Is spotlight indexing every minor variant of the document separately? Thus each time it saves a version, that gets indexed from scratch.

I don't have a solution yet, but I recommend everybody use the feedback assistance early and often. Perhaps Apple's bugtracker will eventually flag it for an engineer who can help.

Can confirm for myself that 15.4 hasn't resolved anything for me.

👍🏼

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?

Hi PolyRod. I have the Pages corespotlight process spike issue and I am not using Time Machine.

Not using TimeMachine, although I probably should.

We don’t & wont know, unless Apple tells us or fixes it & somebody notices.