Mac going at a snail’s pace and occasionally stopping entirely? Try this out

I was having issues recently with my MacBook Pro M4 Pro (one of the most powerful laptops you can get), where it kept pausing for a few seconds. A quick look at Activity Monitor highlighted the issue – process corespotlightd was consuming 150% of the CPU.

A quick check online and I found the potential cause, and it’s one that appears to be quite recent, so possibly a recent bug in the OS (or a specific app).

I knew I was on the right track when people on Reddit, reporting the same issue, talked about the Pages application being behind it. I don’t use it very often, certainly not on this laptop, which is my work one (we use Google Docs for most things) but I’d had open a personal document. As well as a few pages of text it also had a (probably large) audio file embedded in it.

It appears that the longer you leave Pages open, the more it fills a specific folder.

Whether it is Pages, if you’re experiencing the same issue, or not, check out this folder on your Mac…

~/Library/Metadata/Corespotlight

How big is it? Mine was over 100GB in size. I kid you not.

The advice appears to be to just delete that folder – I did so and experienced no ill-effects but I have some people say not to (and those people are selling Mac Cleaning software, so they would say that, right?).