Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

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.

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.

I'm hoping to talk to yet another Apple senior advisor tomorrow (Saturday Feb. 15), not so much seeking a resolution for this issue as to provide Apple's engineers with as much detail about this issue as I can gather.

In pursuit of that goal, I have a question: is anyone seeing these large accumulations of metadata in the ~/library/metadata/CoreSpotlight/ and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/ folders (the latter is a separate folder on Intel systems) without using Pages?

In my experience, if I don't have a Pages document open, Spotlight metadata generally does not grow by more than a few hundred megabytes a day (which ain't nothing, but it's a lot less than the 10 GB/day or so I see if Pages is open). I'm curious if anyone has seen large increases in metadata despite not having Pages in use.

A couple of other observations that are specifically about Spotlight's effects on storage space and battery life on M-series Apple laptops:

First: it seems that while Spotlight processes definitely pile up quite a bit of metadata on M-series Macs, including laptops, it's not as severe as on Intel Macs. One of the reasons it seems to be less severe is that while on Intel Macs I have never seen the CoreSpotlight folders referenced on this thread ever decline in size unless I manually remove data, I'd say that I see day-to-day declines on M-series Macs about 40% of the time. Sometimes the declines are as much as 50% from the previous day.

Second: even though Spotlight metadata does not accumulate on Apple Silicon Macs the way it does on Intel Macs, Spotlight in combination with Pages seems to have a dramatic effect on battery life while the system is ostensibly "sleeping."

If I have a Pages document open on my M2 Max MBP overnight, that will drain the battery by between thirty and forty percent. If I quit Pages, I won't typically see any drain overnight, i.e., the battery will still be at 100% if I charge it after my last use of the day. There doesn't seem to be a way to prevent M-series Macs from doing all kinds of stuff while they're ostensibly asleep with the lid closed ("Power Nap" doesn't seem to be a function you can disable), but in any case Spotlight appears to continue to index the filesystem even while the laptop is asleep if a Pages document is open on it.

• 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.

Thanks Erik. Unfortunately before I had a chance to read that I used a suggestion from an Apple Developers Forum where there's a thread on the subject with a seemingly legit solution. A user pasted a set of commands to run for Terminal which I ran and that included sudo rm -rf... which, possibly because they contain a typo I hastily overlooked, successfully wiped out not only the entire Metadata folder but my entire computer - all my files left unbacked up at that point as I was trying to move things around for the Cloud when this Spotlight bug kicked in and made the computer hardly responsive. Oh well.

The lesson here - anyone looking for suggestions to fix this, please be very careful what you try. People are capable of giving you absolutely destructive instructions even on the developers forum. Please double-check anything before you run anything.

I bought a new M4 MacBook Air [10c/24GB/1TB] Running MacOS 15.3.2] and did not use Migration Assistant. I did turn iCloud Drive on, but I did NOT turn on Desktop and Documents Folders. So I have no data on my SSD, just the OS. I opened large Pages (475 kB) and Numbers (35MB) files from my iCloud Drive that I update through the day and so they are open most of the time. In activity monitor, I noticed that Pages was spiking up to 50 to 70 % when running in the background (whereas the large Numbers file was at 0.4%). Next, I noticed the OS was laggy when command tabbing between apps and saw that corespotlightd and/or kernal_task were sitting at > 200%! (As I type this, corespotlightd is at 126.7%). I reported all issues via Apple's Feedback page. I have also had Numbers doing SBBoD and/or crashing and Apple News has crashed several times too. This behaviour is persistent since I set the Mac up on March 13th 2025.

I have experienced CPU Overload since year end. Grateful for this support thread. I have to move 20-25 GB to Trash from two Metadata folders EVERY DAY! Otherwise overload issues slow computer immensely and geometrically.

While I remain grateful for this bandage method, I want permanent fix. Apple Support had me delete hard drive at year-end, because they could not figure out problem (they should have seen this thread!). I'm still suffering from that unnecessary action.

We've had one Sequoia update since then, but NO improvement to CPU Overload issue. I want to hear status report FROM APPLE! This seems clearly to be software error and will need software fix. The seasons are passing. Time's up! Apple needs to fix this or upgrade my CPU to Apple Silicon, which seems immune to this problem

iMac > 3.8 GHz 8-Core Intel i7 > Sequoia 15.3.2 (24D81)

My M4 mini has been behaving perfectly since Sequoia 15.4. When I first got it, it was extremely fast for my purposes (mostly Pages and web) - and it got slower and slower. I am very pleased it is back to how it should have been all the way through.

My M1 MBP had never been as bad - and it too seems to be altogether somewhat faster.

Hoping this continues to be the case - and it fixes the issues for everyone else.

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.

Update May 22: Still running 15.4.1. Delayed updating to 15.5.

I've cut back my Pages use considerably, using other options. Editing PDFs, Using Notes or e-mail.

I AM still using Pages, but am mostly limiting use to documents created this Spring.

I've continue to use the above 2 step method. Although I have FORGOTTEN to close Pages recently and come back to find NO increase in Corespotlight folder size overnight. So that's great!

Also, why I am concerned about updating to 15.5 as I've seen others with problems.

Of course, security updates may be MORE important.

APPLE - any responses yet?

Does it make any difference whether the file, despite being in an iCloud folder, is In iCloud or Keep Downloaded?

And, for that matter, which state it is in on other machines if it is used on more than one device.