Runaway Spotlight With Pages Document on iCloud Drive
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).
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All this said, based on the now 12(!) pages of discussion since I started this thread, I have become convinced that the problem is Spotlight trying to index documents with a large number of edits. This is exactly how it manifested for me, with an 80k word Pages document being edited by two people with Track Changes turned on. Between us, this resulted in probably more than a thousand edits. Towards the end of the editing, I was seeing beach balling every time I opened this document for more than a few minutes at a time, and had one kernel panic.
Once this editing process was completed, I Finder copied the document. I can now open and make additional edits to the copy without incident.
For three days now:
• I’ve been editing these local Pages files, keeping them open alongside other apps like Mail, Messages, and large Numbers spreadsheets (still stored in iCloud).
• There have been no corespotlightd spikes.
• In fact, the corespotlightd process doesn’t appear at all in Activity Monitor when working outside of iCloud.
• In contrast, with Pages files stored in iCloud/Documents or iCloud/Desktop, corespotlightd is always active.
This suggests a strong link between Pages auto-saving to iCloud Drive and Spotlight re-indexing, which seems to trigger runaway CPS activity.
Via Malcolm Hall:
If you leave a Pages document open that is stored in iCloud Drive then Spotlight will fill the disk and the Mac will begin to hang as it writes out huge files every 10 seconds.
Previously:
- SpotTest 1.1
- Spotlight Indexing Running Wild
- Long App Hangs Due to Spotlight
- Invasive Spotlight Indexing
Update (2025-12-17): eurozerozero:
I’m definitely having this issue.
Today I noticed my MacBook Pro was warm to the touch and had used 30% of its battery in an hour, which never happens. Looking in Activity Monitor there was constant high CPU usage in fileproviderd caused by Pages being open in the background with a shared document that’s in iCloud Drive.
Seems like a very serious bug.
Update (2026-06-17): Glenn Fleishman:
A few weeks ago, however, I started to experience system slowdowns. Pages was taking up 12 GB of system memory! System load went through the roof! CPU consumption was outlandish! All signs pointed to
corespotlightd, a long-time enemy of performance. That daemon handles background indexing for Spotlight, and the slightest thing wrong in a file or directory, or perhaps due to mild corruption in its underlying files, turns it into a rampaging beast that eats processor cycles like I consume potato chips.[…]
One piece of advice I found suggested that if I thought Pages was the problem, I should exclude the iCloud Drive path containing Pages files.
[…]
Finally, after analyzing logs and caches, the culprit was clear. It was not that large a Pages file: every time I saved, Spotlight’s worker bee was performing excessive re-indexing that consumed gigabytes and one or more processor cores. Moving the file to a local directory (in my Documents folder) while editing eliminated the problem. It also freed up space, as the temporary Spotlight indexes and Time Machine snapshots had become absurdly large.
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I can confirm similar behavior, though this was last summer when I was writing a response to an RFP with my design partner. We were using Pages with the shared editing mode and track changes was on. CPU usage would spike, and the fans would start grinding on my M4 iMac. Each time I would have to close the document and reopen it, eventually I started keeping the document closed in between editing/writing sessions.
I had an issue where iCloud would constantly fill up my SSD with huge files I didn’t need downloaded. I would evict them and it would either download them again right away or download different files I didn’t need
Apple support didn’t help and in the end the only thing that fixed it was reformatting my entire computer. Really not a great experience
I have persistent problems with fileproviderd spiking and spotlight becoming unresponsive as a result. Quitting or unmounting whatever file service I’m using helps.
macOS requires a lot of babysitting these days.
I have the same issue.
Store all my pages documents on iCloud Drive. The beach ball/cursor hangs occur in all programs now, not just Pages. Tech support not helpful. Even went to Apple Store and had them wipe the computer and reinstall completely and its still happening, and it's with a 2024 iMac.
The problem was not happening until I upgraded to Tahoe OS.
Getting ready to just buy a new machine at this point.
I know this is an old post but I wanted to add that I've been facing the same problem, and like Kevin's experience mine causes any program to beachball. It's solely down to spotlight, and I store all documents in iCloud, so that might explain it
I've been able to get it to be less of a problem by disabling and enabling Spotlight, but it's still happening to some degree
I haven't reported it to Apple cos I have no idea how to even describe it without it sounding too broad for them to investigate
Same. Do we have a work around? I'm happy to turn off spotlight, if it will allow my (new!) macbook pro two work without hanging.
Same problem for me. This seems to be a very common, really hoping Apple can resolve it.
It might not make a difference, but I think more folks should report it to Apple. Even if it's nonspecific, I'd hate for this problem to continue simply because they aren't aware of it.
I have now completely disabled Spotlight and am using search tools that do not depend on its index. It's insane how much better this simple change has made using my Mac.
I am experiencing the same problems. This started after installing OS 26 in 2025. Strangely, the problem went away for six months from January to June 2026, and then it came back. I uninstalled Bitdefender. Reinstalled OS26. Did disk first aid. Dragged my finder into the search spotlight box to disable searches of finder stuff. I've had four chats with Apple. They are suggesting reformatting. My argument is that if I reformat and restore from Time Machine, a process I have little confidence in, I will just reintroduce whatever corrupted file is causing the problem. I primarily am using Pages to write a novel, but the freezing is on everything except, confusingly, chats with Apple and what I am entering here right now. These must be clues, but Apple has been little help so far. It is so nice to type without freezes. I may just keep typing here for therapy. I may have to disable spotlight. How do you do that?
> I may have to disable spotlight. How do you do that?
sudo mdutil -a -d
Then use something like Find Any File for searching. It's similarly fast to Spotlight, and the results are much better.
