Performance & battery · Heat and fans
What does Storage Studio do when my Mac starts getting hot?
Short answer: As your Mac warms up, Storage Studio drops to Light and slows its background work; if it gets critically hot, it pauses that work entirely. Heavy jobs wait for the Mac to cool, then resume on their own.
It steps back in stages. When macOS reports your Mac is warming up, Storage Studio's Automatic setting moves to Light ("Mac is warming up — effects paused"), dropping live graphs and slowing its background work. If the Mac becomes critically hot, it drops to Survival and pauses all heavy background work.
Some jobs also check the temperature themselves before starting: background duplicate scanning shows "Waiting — your Mac is running hot.", and detailed cloud-account analysis won't begin on a hot Mac.
When the Mac cools down, everything resumes without you doing anything. See what Survival mode is.