After installing macOS Tahoe26.0 beta5 (25A5338b) or beta4, a memory and disk leak appears, likely caused by Spotlight indexing. The mds_stores process consumes up to 60 GB of RAM, while disk writes continue until an additional 50 GB is filled. Once the maximum is reached, the system frees the space and the cycle repeats, leading to severe memory leakage. In the available space, system data occupies as much as 150 GB.
System Versions Affected:
macOS Tahoe26.0 beta5 (25A5338b) and beta4.
Reproduction Steps:
Occurs immediately after booting up, with no additional user actions.
Workaround:
Booting into Safe Mode prevents the issue from occurring.
Possible Cause:
A bug in Spotlight indexing. In Safe Mode, Launchpad cannot search for applications, and no other issues have been observed so far. This strongly suggests that Spotlight indexing is the root cause.
Potentially Affected Software:
Developer-related tools such as Node.js, Maven, Vue.js, etc. It is possible that Spotlight is indexing developer project dependency directories (e.g., node_modules), which contain a large number of small files that do not require indexing, leading to this problem.
