Mitch Stone:

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).

[…]

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.

KWiPod:

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.

Bug iCloud Drive macOS 15 Sequoia macOS Tahoe 26 Pages.app Spotlight

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