CGPDFService constantly running

[Spectrum]

About a week ago I updated a mac mini 2018 i7 to Sequoia (from Catalina, that I now regret upgrading from...)
Following the update, I had to rebuild the search index because neither Alfred nor Spotlight could find anything.

I now have a constant CGPDFservice that won't die. I've left my Mac on for days and this process just won't ever quit. Force-quitting it, and it comes back a few seconds later. It is always consuming one core maxed out, and making the system feel kind of unresponsive - and makes the mac mini quite hot).
How can I get rid of this thing?!?

 

[zevrix]

Looks like it's a common issue, maybe you'll find any solutions here:

ð "cgpdfservice" cpu - Google Search

www.google.com

 

[Patrice Brousseau]

Spotlight indexing PDF docs I think. Maybe try to disable and then, reenable Spotlight on this drive again?

 

[Spectrum]

I think I narrowed this down to a colleague updating lots of PDFs in a synced folder...
I've now made that folder online only and it seems to have gone away...

 

[learjet]

CGPDFservice is constantly causing background CPU load on my machine (MBA 13 M3, latest Sequoia release) and seemingly never stops indexing. Does anyone have the same problem? How can I fix that?

 

[bogdanw]

How can I fix that?

Try System Settings - Spotlight - uncheck PDF documents.

 

[learjet]

Has that solved the issue for you? According to various internet reports, unchecking that setting doesn't change anything?

 

[blmatthews]

Turning off PDF Documents in Spotlight's settings hasn't changed anything for me, and while I do have some PDFs in my iCloud drive, it's only a few and not very big.

 

[wjcroft]

Same issue here, Spotlight PDF setting is ignored and does not stop this service. I could understand if this was just a one type high CPU load after new install. But these multiple processes keep coming back EACh evening to swamp my machine. The Apple developer who created this Medusa should be shot.

 

[bogdanw]

I think this might be related to QuickLook.

I have QuickLook disabled and CGPDFService is not running. It started only when I saved a webpage as pdf and it closed itself in less than a minute.

On a virtual machine that has QuickLook enabled, two instances of CGPDFService started when a webpage was saved as pdf from Safari and only one closed, one remained active (CPU 0.0%).

 

[galad]

It means it's stuck trying to create the thumbnail of a PDF, check which PDF is by selecting the stuck process in Activity Monitor and by pressing the "I" button in the toolbar, and send it to Apple with Feedback Assistant.