spotlightknowledged consumes over 40 GB RAM after sleep even on macOS 26.1 (Tahoe)

Hi everyone,

I’m still facing a persistent SpotlightKnowledge memory leak issue on macOS 26.1 (Tahoe) running on a MacBook Air M4.

Every time my Mac goes to sleep (screen off or lid closed), the process spotlightknowledged starts consuming extremely high memory — often 30–45 GB or more according to Activity Monitor.

When I wake the laptop, it becomes very slow or laggy until I manually Force Quit spotlightknowledged. The memory is never released automatically.

I have already tried the following without success:

• Rebuilt Spotlight index using sudo mdutil -E /
• Deleted and rebuilt SpotlightKnowledge caches:
  • ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.spotlightknowledge/
  • ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/
• Excluded OneDrive and iCloud folders from Spotlight indexing
• Disabled Power Nap (sudo pmset -a powernap 0)

Despite all of this, the problem reappears every time the Mac sleeps.

Using fs_usage, I noticed that during the memory spike the process loops on its own metadata files:

/Users/[username]/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.v2/events/
/Users/[username]/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/SpotlightKnowledgeEvents/index.v2/journals/

This seems to indicate an internal SpotlightKnowledge loop or memory leak rather than normal file indexing activity.

At this point, the only temporary workaround is to manually force quit the process after each wake, which is inconvenient.

Question:

• Is there any official Apple method to prevent spotlightknowledged from running during sleep or to safely disable the Knowledge Agent without turning off System Integrity Protection (SIP)?
• Has Apple acknowledged this as a known issue in macOS 26.1?

I’d appreciate any insights, workarounds, or confirmation from others experiencing the same problem.

— bieeyx