Continued corespotlightd process CPU overload issues

Thank you Eric. I have gone to that and there is no folder listed as metadata. Am I looking in the wrong place? If I am, I would appreciate you telling me how to find this. I have gone to Settings, clicked Spotlight, Privacy and told it to rebuild, and have not have major success with that. I did this when an Apple Support person told me to this. Any help is greatly appreciated.

I agree. In my recent contributions, I have keet things simple and focussed on the temporary solution that works for me when using Pages on my M4 MacBook Air (with MacOS Sonoma 15.5, Pages 14.4) in the hope that it may work for others. 

However, yes, there are complications. At my end are: 

1. I never had the issue on my M1Max MacBook Pro (now dedicated to audio). 

2. When I have been working on a Pages document that is stored on my SSD, I have had the following error message when attempting to save changes: 

The document “” is on a volume that does not support permanent storage.”

The message is concerning because, of course, the whole point of the SSD is to be permeant storage.  I’ve had this message several times including just now.

3. A few weeks ago, apropos of nothing, iCloud Drive ‘Desktop & Document Folders’ just turned itself off. 

The resulting chaos led me to erase the internal drive and reinstall Sonoma on my MBA as a new device because otherwise, my MBA could see iCloud, but not the contents of the Documents folder, despite these contents being visible on my MBP, iPhone and iCloud.com.

Are these issues relevant ? I don't know, but now they are out there!

I'm SO hoping to see an update to Pages that lists this issue in the update description ! 

That's right - unless an issue is listed in Apple's update release notes, we can't know.

We can report the issue to apple via: Feedback - Pages - Apple - that link is specifically for 'Pages for macOS'. (Apologies if you and any other readers already have). It is through this mechanism that I have, in the past, for both Pages and Logic Pro, been contacted by Apple asking for more information about an issue I've raised and asking me to install a 'profile' which I then emailed back to them.

Beyond that, we can post to your favourite Mac news site such as https://www.macrumors.com, https://appleinsider.com/, https://9to5mac.com/, https://www.cultofmac.com/. Sometimes, these sites pick up on an apple community or forum if they notice it has become busy.

Pages crashed today. I captured the error log. Here are the 'highlights':

Process:               Pages [9167]

Path:                  /Applications/Pages.app/Contents/MacOS/Pages

Identifier:            com.apple.iWork.Pages

Version:               14.4 (7043.0.93)

Build Info:            Pages-7043000093000000~4 (1A89s)

App Item ID:           409201541

App External ID:       873302190

Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)

Parent Process:        launchd [1]

Date/Time:             2025-07-08 08:10:15.2254 +0100

OS Version:            macOS 15.5 (24F74)

Report Version:        12

Time Awake Since Boot: 75000 seconds

Time Since Wake:       911 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)

Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason:    Namespace LIBSYSTEM, Code 2 Application Triggered Fault

Application Specific Information:

assertion failure: "!view->_hasCachedVisibleRect" -> %llu

My hope is of course, that someone at Apple knows what all this means ... and that's it's relevant to our specific corespotlughtd issues.

Adding a few afterthoughts.

• I'm now paying more attention to the %CPU before it pauses and have noted that it's not always high when it happens. Could be down in the 80's or 90's. But after the pause and then the screenshot works, it'll jump back up.
• Might be worth noting that it also does not always 'pinwheel' - just freezes - it's happening now as I'm typing this (Pages open in the background).
• Pages will randomly close - all Pages docs open just closed. If you haven't got auto save on or thought to save it say goodbye to all your hard work
• Today I also went to the docs I am working on in Finder and changed the to 'Keep download' since I figured perhaps that might help it not sync to iCloud.
• I feel like it might have something to do with 'Autosave' but I'm not game to turn it off to try in case I loose all my work when it shuts down spontaneously like it has been.
• The keyboard has been doing strange things also - not letting me go back to where the cursor was, running off and doing its own thing. The accent thing that pops up if you hold the letter down was appearing randomly today. All seems to be tying in with this corespotlight issue.
• Ok yep - it just deleted my whole sentence!
• I updated to the new software this morning - 15.6.1

How is this not fixed yet? I've written Apple 3 times now since the start of the year to report this bug, kept my computer up to date, and I still have to delete GBs worth of data from the CoreSpotlight folder every single day as this bug has lingered for over a year now. What is Apple doing?

The issue is still with us in MacOS Sequoia 15.6.1.

I saw a post (via an email from this community) from Privacy86 in which he stated "I just installed xxxx and it appears to have fixed the CPU overload...at least as far as I can tell so far!"

The email link produces the error page "Looking for something in Apple Support Communities?"

This is because Privacy86's post was removed (as was my original version of this post) as it mentions a xxxx version of MacOS.

Yes, my post was removed by Apple. And it was premature. 😢

My corespotlightd issues are worse than they have ever been… my MacBook Pro M4 is unusable / frozen for seconds at a time.

Pages is the primary culprit, but the freezing occurs without it as well.

Apple should be ashamed for remaining silent on this issue - it has been impacting my new MacBook for almost a year now.

Thank you for letting us all know Privacy86.

It looks like September isn't going to bring us a solution.

Back here in 15.6.1 land, my 2025 M4 MacBook Air is, like your M4 MacBook Pro is unusable. And like you, I am astonished that Apple has not even so much as acknowledged the corespotlightd issue.

First let me say, I find Apple discussion very confusing to figure out. It seems almost completely random which post I am reply to, which posts I see first, in what order I see posts. Also frustrating is when I click a post I receive in an email, it never takes me to that post.

As to the issue at hand, tentavely it seems to have resolved for me. I have had a pages file open for days, made a few edits to it, and my ~/Library/Metadate/corespotlightd is currently <1 KB. (you read that right, the size of the folder is in bytes) Granted, it's a small file.

I'm on a Macbook Air M3, and the resolution has persisted through the update to 15.6.

As others have said, there are likely several factors at work, and I am leaving the pages file open and monitoring Activity Monitor. It has been suggested to focus on performance issues rather than AM, however, I find some performance issues can be hard to detect until they really bite me, e.g. battery depletion with lid closed. I monitor AM and if I see a spike, I montior it more closely to see if it persists or subsides. I also send occasional feedback to Apple on the issue.

Hey there, on the crazy sorting of post go to your profile>Subscriptions, look for edit preferenceson the right and scroll all the way down and look for default thread sort, choose oldest… grrrrrr Apple!

One might assume this is because with it being the 'Beta' version, this would mean they are still ironing out issues and therefore any problems with it shouldn't 'unnecessarily' deter users from updating when they release the official public release...

Therefore implying such problems will be gone by the time we get the standard release?! Ha! I won't hold my breath...

It does beg the question though - does that imply an Apple consultant is actually monitoring and therefore aware of this thread - or was it a bot that removed your email? Given your experience - whatever they've done to 'fix' it - is far from finding the root of the cause because their scrambling to work it out?

Worth sharing that following my last comment, after the course of the next 5 hours resulting in another 82 pin wheels (screenshots taken each time it paused, I forgot a few), I gave in and paid for a Microsoft 365 subscription so that I could use Word 😔. Changes etc to their programs have reinforced my belief that it is a rought! But it's returned my work flow to how a computer should run whilst using Word, so I play the game.

My calculations of time lost:

82/5 =16.4 occurrences each hour.

I haven't yet timed how long the screen is stuck for, but lets say 10 seconds on a short stint.

That's a total loss of 13 minutes and 40 seconds over 5 hours. Never mind the interruption in flow of thoughts and the distraction/impact on efficiency.

That's significant.

In a world where we rely on technology in a multi-billion dollar industry, us minions appear to be merely slaves to their busy lives. Maybe we should all change industries so that we're not reliant on these programs - wouldn't that be a different world!

I am experiencing beach balling on my powerful M4 Mac mini (32gb of ram). Basic tasks are now beach balling.

I see that corespotlightd in Activity Monitor is above 100% of CPU; which led me to this post.

I am curious. The recommendation is to trash everything from the Corespotlight folder. Does that mean everything? I saw here that someone said they 'left the folder structure' intact, or they deleted the spotlight knowledge events folder contents; however, that spotlight knowledge events folder IS a part of the core spotlight folder - so what can safely be deleted? Can someone confirm?

Tahoe 26 holding steady with a long Pages document open in iCloud. My Corespotlight folder fluctuates between about 4 GB and 8 GB. Temperature on my Mac mini is still cool to the touch. No noticeable slowdown in performance. Any others of you out there having this experience with Tahoe?

Hi JNoel54. When you say solved, do you mean the corespotlight folders stopped ballooning permanently and/or the corespotlightd process stops spiking ? Thank you for taking the time to work with these issues!