Mac mini M4 constantly freezing

[AppleFan.]

Hello everyone,

I have had an M4 Mac mini with 24GB of RAM and 1TB storage for more than a year now and it has always performed great.

Since 1 or 2 weeks I have been encountering a lot of performance problems with it like constant beach balls and freezes when performing a wide arrange of tasks. from simple tasks like resizing a window, clicking a button, typing in a text field to more demanding tasks like editing in Final Cut Pro and working in Pixelmator Pro. Restarting my Mac only sometimes fixes the issue temporarily.

The weird thing is that my memory pressure is in the green most of the time, the Mac doesn't seem to get very hot, no swap is being used and my storage is halfway filled.

I did observe 2 things however and I am not sure if they are causing the issue but in Activity Monitor I see that both the processes corespotlightd and kernel_task are using a lot of CPU:

I have even seen it get much higher like in the 200%.

I have also noticed that when my Mac freezes for a couple seconds, the CPU load spikes:

I was hoping someone that has experienced similar issues could help me with this issue. I have already tried to restart, boot into safe (the freezing also happens there) and a disk check. My Mac is on macOS 26.5.1

I know I can try to reinstall macOS but I was hoping someone had a fix that doesn't require reinstalling macOS.

Thanks!

 

[!!!]

Try resetting spotlight (follow the typical advice online) and deleting ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight from your user's Library folder.

It's possible kernel_task is getting blocked by heavy filesystem activity and thus causing the rest of the system to freeze up. Though it's weird to see SystemUIServer consuming so much CPU.

 

[AppleFan.]

Try resetting spotlight (follow the typical advice online) and deleting ~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight from your user's Library folder.

It's possible kernel_task is getting blocked by heavy filesystem activity and thus causing the rest of the system to freeze up. Though it's weird to see SystemUIServer consuming so much CPU.

Thanks for the tip! I have followed the steps and now spotlight is reindexing. I will check on it later.

 

[benholt]

Adding to the spotlight angle above — if Time Machine is on to anything, `tmutil listlocalsnapshots /` will show APFS local snapshots that have piled up. Those get reindexed too, and on a mini doing FCP work they can stack quickly and starve actual IO. `sudo tmutil thinlocalsnapshots / 1000000000 4` clears them aggressively if there's a backlog. The other quick check is Console.app filtered for "I/O timeout" or "APFS" around the freeze times — kernel_task can spike when something below the OS layer (firmware, thermal) throttles the SSD path and Activity Monitor won't surface it. If Console comes up clean, next step I'd take is booting from an external SSD to see if the freezes follow.

 

[AppleFan.]

After resetting spotlight and reindexing it seems to be performing well like always. Thank you guys for the help!