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.
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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
