Level 2

306 points

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

I am wondering if anyone has discovered any new ideas for stopping the corespotlightd process from hogging the CPU. According to Activity Monitor, the corespotlightd process often occupies more than 100% of the CPU load, sometimes spiking as high as 400% on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio. This problem has become so severe that it often pinwheels under normally non-intensive tasks. It can cause the video to flicker on my Studio Display. In one case it caused my Mac to kernel panic (crash).

I encountered this bug only after installing Sequoia 15.2, but having researched this issue extensively, I find that Mac users have identified it since at least macOS Ventura. So here are some solutions we don't need to hear again:

Reindexing Spotlight by adding and removing volumes in Spotlight Privacy. This provides relief only temporarily. Within hours the process is again grinding the Mac to a halt.

Killing the corespotlightd in Activity Monitor. Again, this is at best only a temporary solution as the process will reinstate itself.

A "clean" install of macOS. First of all, no such process really exists. The OS recovery process simply reinstalls a new copy of the System files. Nobody reports this as a fix. An internal drive wipe and reformat, and restore from Time Machine is also unlikely to help, as it simply returns your Mac to its previous state. If the corespotlightd problem results from a corrupted file, the problem will likely simply be recreated in your reinstall. "Nuke and pave" might solve the problem if it caused by a format or directory issue on your startup volume. This does not seem to be the case, but if anyone has permanently cured the problem by this method, please report it.

What we do need to hear is from anyone who has spent time with Apple Support on this issue and been provided with solutions that actually work, or has new ideas about what causes it. Feels like we're on our own here, since Apple seems to be stumped.

Posted on Dec 19, 2024 11:21 AM

Top-ranking reply

ericmurphysf

Level 2

307 points

Posted on Jan 31, 2025 8:44 AM

Okay, I have a new hypothesis as to what's going on here with corespotlightd. This process is one of at least four that are responsible for macOS's Spotlight functionality. The three others are mds, mdworker, and md_stores. I cribbed the following descriptions of these three processes from the HowToGeek website:

The two processes [mds and mdworker] are part of Spotlight, the macOS search tool. The first, mds, stands for metadata server. This process manages the index used to give you quick search results. The second, mdworker, stands for metadata server worker. This does the hard work of actually indexing your files to make that quick searching possible.

And for md_stores, from the TechNewsToday site:

Mds_stores is the core indexing process of the macOS. On normal days, it usually takes up a noticeable [sic, probably should be un-noticeable] amount of CPU. However, when you reinstall your OS or add new files/directories, your system will automatically start to reindex these new databases, which sees the mds_stores CPU usage skyrocket.

The macOS Spotlight feature makes use of two processes for indexing the system database; mds and mds_stores. The mds (Metadata Server) process is responsible for tracking and recording files and folders in your operating system. md_stores then compiles and manages these mds metadata, which Spotlight later uses for searching certain documents within your OS.

So it may be that corespotlightd is in fact an unwitting victim of other processes' having gone awry. On my two Intel systems, by three months after installing macOS 15.0, metadata associated with Spotlight located at ~/library/metadata had reached half a terabyte on both systems. It sounds like this data was actually written out by either mdworker, mds_stores, or both. And then, corespotlightd has to wade through these gigabytes upon gigabytes of metadata to actually produce search results, and as that task gets harder and harder with more and more metadata being produced, eventually Spotlight search results (which includes search and smart folders through Mail) degrade to the point of uselessness.

While I haven't managed to halt the rapid growth of metadata on these two Intel systems (Apple Silicon Macs still have the issue but to a much milder degree), simply deleting the metadata out of the ~/library/metadata/Corespotlight and ~/library/metadata/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents (while leaving the folders themselves intact) resulted in a near-immediate improvement in three areas: greatly reduced use of storage space; vastly improved search results; and much lower processor utilization by corespotlightd.

As noted, this metadata still continues to pile up (especially if I have a large (>5 MB) Pages file open). But if I have to empty out these two folders once every few weeks until Apple resolves the issue, that's not the end of the world).

View in context

346 replies

Feb 10, 2025 12:33 PM in response to sugarskyline

sugarskyline wrote:

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

No. I first started running into problems in mid-December, when I think was still running 15.1, and looking at the metadata files written before that time I can see that they were starting to grow not long after I installed Sequoia. Moreover, online research suggests users were running into this issue as early as macOS Ventura, although it appears to have gotten much more prevalent after Sequoia was released.

Feb 10, 2025 1:09 PM in response to Bets

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.

Tink212

Level 1

8 points

Feb 12, 2025 6:24 AM in response to AshkaTheMoltenFury

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!

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Feb 12, 2025 9:41 AM in response to Bets

Google around a bit and you will find as I did that reports of the corespotlightd process running amok go back at least as far as Ventura. Perhaps not to the extent we are seeing it now, but certainly it is not entirely new to Sequoia and its more recent iterations. I mention this because if Apple is monitoring this discussion, it seems to me their engineers will have dig back further into their code base than Sequoia to find the bugs.

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.

drjz

Level 1

20 points

Feb 18, 2025 4:56 PM in response to fronesis47

This is a serious problem, Apple. I have a new, basic MBA M3 and it is LAGGING terribly, to the point of being extremely annoying. I have turned off AI, turned off Spotlight on all the folders, put user files into the 'secure' (not indexed). I turned off Spotlight in the terminal (sudo mdutil -i off), force-killed it repeatedly using the Activity Monitor, yet corespotlightd repeatedly restarts. A zombie Spotlight that keeps stealing my CPU is very aggravating, not what we expect or paid for.

Mar 6, 2025 2:02 PM in response to Mitch Stone

I already tried all the listed suggestions. And the issue seemingly does not manifest consistently for everyone. I know there's been a primary focus on system folders but that was always the lesser of my problems. The spikes I see aren't ignorable, they bump CPU usage up to a consistent 40%+ on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro unless I close the app. There is no way the app can be seen as usable when it's single handedly taking up nearly half the CPU power. Battery drainage is also significant as within minutes it's as high as if I was using video editing software. I would've ignored everything else if it meant I could get back to using this app cause I have things that need to get done at the end of the day and I'd much prefer to use this app as the primary choice but the impact on my machine beyond the SSD writes and deletable folders is way too much. Activity Monitor isn't why I can't ignore it, it's how I get met with immutable fan noise and system slowdown. These are also issues I have always had bundled together rather than it being something that appeared later after the system folder issues.

Also, in response to LAWM0N, I was using a Word doc in the Pages app, rather than using the Word app (I don't own it).

RThomas

Level 1

21 points

Mar 6, 2025 2:10 PM in response to RThomas

Update - yeah - the mouse update changed functioning only when Pages is not open. Still having lag issues as well as CPU and CoreSpotlight Metadata problems.

For me Pages is a vital tool that cannot be replaced. Dumping the corespotlight metadata one a week or so will have to do until they can do the fix.

REALLY HOPING they are not planning to ditch Pages… it is the most usable program outside of InDesign for my purposes - and InDesign is WAY too expensive!

Mar 7, 2025 1:36 AM in response to fronesis47

How do you delete meta data folders? I'm really not tech savy, but I'm experiencing the same issues as other are talking about. I'm writing a thesis and when I open the pages document, which is very large, my computer starts to have intermittent lags and cursor freezes.

I would like to use a work around for now, until apple figures out a solution.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Mar 9, 2025 10:50 PM in response to ericmurphysf

Out of curiosity, I performed another Get Info on my Corespotlight folder. It is now 12.2 GB. Looking back a couple of months into this discussion, I found I'd reported it back then at 37 GB. I have never trashed this folder. So it seems it can actually get smaller without user intervention.

Mar 9, 2025 10:55 PM in response to Mitch Stone

Mitch Stone wrote:

Out of curiosity, I performed another Get Info on my Corespotlight folder. It is now 12.2 GB. Looking back a couple of months into this discussion, I found I'd reported it back then at 37 GB. I have never trashed this folder. So it seems it can actually get smaller without user intervention.

This is definitely true on Apple Silicon systems. I've never seen it happen on either of my Intel systems.

Mar 16, 2025 4:05 AM in response to Mitch Stone

Hi! And here I was wondering why my two M2 Macbooks (one from 2023, other from 2025) and a brand new iPhone 16E all connected through a Cloud sharing one simple small 7-8 pages long Pages document which is almost always open on some of the device... keep bumping up CPU to 100-300% in Activity Monitor, having caused one of the computers to completely freeze and crash two times already and constantly heating up the other.

The Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight folder is 50GB, the store.db files alone takes up like 8GB each. If I close Pages and just keep TextEdit open with an iCloud-shared file, the spotlightd process does sometimes come up and spike up to a 100 percent but at least the computer isn't hot to physically touch anymore.

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.

I'm a bit puzzled – these three Apple devices together in 2025 cost about as much as a new car but they're incapable of handling basic text editing computers in 1991 managed well? I'm really not used to a brand new Mac with nothing but 1 file in a text editor open running a spinning rainbow wheel while I try to write simple letters. Please help. Thank you so much!

leon_t2f

Level 1

12 points

Mar 23, 2025 4:09 PM in response to Mitch Stone

I too am experiencing this same problem. I've reinstalled OS several times. I concur with the conclusions that it is somehow related to Pages and Spotlight. Looking forward to seeing a permanent solution because this is crippling my M4 Max. Thanks everyone

PolyRod

Level 1

32 points

Apr 7, 2025 1:34 AM in response to PolyRod

Still generally good.

Pages has fallen over a few times.

One document was interesting - I had the ToC visible and, when I made changes to the text, I could see the consequent ToC changes rippling through for some time, maybe half a minute or more. I wonder if propagation of changes to ToC, in order, was one of the things that has been fixed?

lcjhnsn

Level 1

10 points

Apr 11, 2025 2:32 PM in response to KWiPod

Contrary to KWIPod's experience, the update to 15.4 has not resolved the issue for me. Updated to Sequoia 15.4 (24E247) but still experiencing the high CPU usage while a moderately large Pages document is open.

Mitch Stone Author

Level 2

306 points

Apr 28, 2025 9:44 AM in response to fronesis47

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, and this by itself could very well not be the cause of the performance hit. So I say, in the name of sanity and productivity, to stop obsessing over your metadata files size and Activity Monitor unless you find that your Mac is performing poorly.

Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues