Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Alongside the spotlight issues, has anyone else been having problems with Pages itself falling over?

I have a few quite complex documents and have been finding two things have increased in parallel: all the beachballs/spotlight issues AND Pages falling over and reporting to Apple.

From my perspective, Pages seems to fail when, after making an edit which might itself be trivial, I scroll. Pages disappears, then I get the windows asking if I want the report to go to Apple (and I always do allow that), and if I want to let Pages restart.

Time after time, Pages only loses the tiniest bit of editing. (Hats off to Apple on that score.) But it takes an annoying time to be able to get back to editing the document again.

I'm adding in to this thread because my perception is that both issues have worsened which makes me wonder if they are intertwined?

Given the vast number of automatic reports from me alone, I'd have hoped Apple would notice and fix the Pages issue. And, if it is related, maybe fix the spotlight issue by so doing. Or vice versa.

I also want to appreciate the efforts put in to get the spotlight issue resolved.

Has anyone else noticed that upon restarting the Mac, without ever opening Pages, the disk reads and writes are barely anything at all, but after opening and closing Pages, it will continue to read and write varying low amounts of data at very random and frequent intervals? And seemingly in a very unpredictable fashion compared to if Pages was open? My Mac has been restarted for hours and the disk had so little activity going on. The graph was quite flat. Now after opening Pages and closing it entirely after just a couple of seconds, it won't stop writing very low amounts and reading random amounts of data. I've noticed this for days but today really seals it for me that I'm not imagining it. Once the bug is triggered it cannot truly be eliminated unless you restart.

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.

That's what worries me about this problem. With the manifestation of it being so diverse and unpredictable despite the commonalities, it could make diagnosing and solving the issue much more complicated for Apple compared to standard bugs. Ironically, when Apple Support was asking me to provide a screenshot, that was the very first time since I bought this Mac that Pages behaved. I had to wait several minutes to get it to trigger again. Very bizarre.

Is it accurate to say though that everyone here was having a good time before Sequoia 15.2?

sugarskyline wrote:

Is it accurate to say though that everyone here was having a good time before Sequoia 15.2?

YES. I never had this problem prior to Sequoia, and I'm 99% sure it didn't show up on 15.0.x or on 15.1.x.

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 had been having problems before my upgrade to Sequoia. I am a heavy pages user with large docs. I began experiencing lag about a year before upgrading. As noted by another poster, the lag and freeze was most noticeable if I had made many edits, and was scrolling through the doc *without* hitting save. I was able to reduce the problems if I saved every minute or so while working.

Once I upgraded, the problems increased to pretty much any time I have a pages doc open - whether I've edited it recently or not, and no matter how little or big the file is. I've tried every solution listed here - most multiple times - they all work for a bit - sometimes for a longer, sometimes for shorter time period.

REALLY hoping they get this fixed soon - I use pages all the time, both while working with clients and as I'm preparing a manual for publication.

PolyRod wrote:

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.

Interesting about the Table of Contents in Pages files. I keep a daily journal which by the end of the year can run to well over a thousand pages (I'm long-winded to put it mildly). These journals have 13 ToCs: the main one with entries for each month, and then each month has a section ToC entry for each day in the month.

This issue became particularly severe towards the middle of December of last year when my Pages journal file was over a thousand pages long and had something like 350 ToC entries. The problem persisted even after I stopped editing, or even opening, this journal file and started a new one for the new year. But I think what happens is once the metadata gets to a certain size (maybe 100 GB or more), the problem starts to snowball, with increasingly large amounts of metadata being saved and corespotlightd spiking as it tries to trudge through hundreds of gigabytes of metadata.

I've had very good luck with just deleting all this metadata and letting Spotlight rebuild it. It doesn't cure the problem permanently, but so long as I don't let these folders get too large, my systems are gratifyingly free of the stalls, system crashes, and even Time Machine issues I'd been having previously.

Bets wrote:

@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.

I think it's safe to say macOS 15.3.1 will not address this issue. According to one poster Apple's engineers have been aware of this issue since February 8 (two days ago), which is odd because I've been complaining about it since at least January 20.

I also relocated the contents of the folders named “NSFFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstAuthentication” and “Priority,” deleting files from the original folders.

After restarting I did not open Pages for a couple of hours, on checking the above folders, they had not changed in size since restarting.

I opened two documents within Pages and within 30 minutes the directories had doubled in size.  

I closed Pages and have just checked the directories again. After 12 hours, their sizes have not increased.

As somebody previously mentioned, the “store.db” file in both directories is exhibiting rapid growth but as to why, I don’t know

Thank you!! My Mac mini M1 16GB/512GB had started really lagging and I couldn't figure it out at all. A bit of googling and I found this post. The pesky corespotlight has gone from using 130%+ of my CPU, down to 0%. You are my hero. I'd never heard of that as a thing I should do, but will keep on top of it going forward. Mac now running like a dream again!

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.

Zenith wrote:

Next stop on the troubleshooting train: exclude ~/Library/Metadata from spotlight. Why would we need spotlight to index that anyway for routine operation?

I think you're right about what is causing Spotlight metadata to balloon (and have been discussing the matter with Apple support for over a month; currently I'm waiting for a response from engineering).

That said, I tried your troubleshooting step noted above, with negative results: Spotlight metadata continued to grow, and much more quickly if Pages is running with a document open. The only "fix" for this issue I've found to work so far is to regularly delete Spotlight metadata out of the ~/library folder. I'm a pretty heavy user of Pages, so I have to do this about every ten days, by which time metadata has usually exceeded 60 GB.