Link for how to kill spindump -- Apple please fix this infuriating software

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Level 1

6 points

Link for how to kill spindump -- Apple please fix this infuriating software

People have been complaining about spindump (stuttering audio, spindump taking over the entire processor and thrashing the disk when Leopard thinks a program "is not responding") for well over a year and it seems like Apple has done nothing to mitigate the problems with it.

While I think I understand the need for spindump (to dump the contents of memory to disk at the moment of the offending program hangs so that it can be used for the crash reporter), the way it's implemented is horrible, and causes wild CPU usage and disk thrashing often when the machine can least afford it -- when a program is being paged in from disk and appears to the system to be hanging.

I used the method here: http://matthew.kurowski.org/?p=109 to disable spindump, and it is just absolutely amazing how much more responsive my Mac is when it's having to page in huge applications (like Aperture/Photoshop/Illustrator/Dreamweaver) from virtual memory after having swapped them out to disk (which even with 4GB RAM tends to happen often for me because I tend to leave about 20 apps open at once). I now no longer have to look into Activity Monitor to see spindump fighting with all my other apps for processor and disk transfer bandwidth.

MBP 2.6, Mac OS X (10.5.6), 4GB/500GB

Posted on Mar 18, 2009 5:40 PM

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Answer 1

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Mar 18, 2009 6:59 PM in response to esoterica

You've obviously given this a lot of thought; so what's the solution?

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Answer 2

esoterica Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 18, 2009 9:20 PM in response to orangekay

I certainly don't claim to know enough about underlying OS design to know what a good solution would be, but if there's no way to fix spindump then it should be abolished, because while I understand that it helps Apple to make more reliable software in the long run, that's no use to me when I'm on deadline and I'm twiddling my thumbs because spindump has gone and decided to take over my computer for an indeterminate amount of time, which is especially infuriating when +nothing is wrong besides the time it's taking for the OS to page an app back in from disk.+

BTW, Mozy Backup also has the tendency to look to the OS like it's hanging -- even though it's a background app and thus really doesn't matter if it's hanging for short periods -- which of course causes the invocation of spindump which then tries to fight with Mozy over disk access causing Mozy, of course, to in turn run even slower. It's a total fustercluck.

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Answer 3

orangekay

Level 5

4,085 points

Mar 18, 2009 11:29 PM in response to esoterica

So you want to abolish something you don't know anything about? Sounds like killer blog material.

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Answer 4

esoterica Author

Level 1

6 points

Mar 20, 2009 8:39 PM in response to orangekay

Do you have anything useful to say or just snark? Spindump can be disabled without any negative consequences to the user (and with many reports of hugely positive consequences), and it's new to Leopard so if it can be put in it can be taken back out. Regardless, if your rush to cattiness hadn't gotten in the way, you might have noticed I was actually advocating fixing spindump. I'm not an engineer and I'm not paid to be, I pay Apple huge amounts of money on a near-yearly basis so I can have a computer that doesn't get in my way, and, again, spindump gets in the way at the absolute worst possible moments.

BTW, I fully believe that many people don't realize that Spindump is choking their systems because it's a problem to track down (you have to have Activity Monitor running when the slowdown occurs because the processor pegging and disk thrashing that spindump causes prevents Activity Monitor from launching until spindump calms down).

Since it's apparently a better use of your time to snark than search:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6796856

http://jamesreubenknowles.com/disable-spindump-71

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/298908-crashreporter-spind ump-leopard.html

http://macosx.com/forums/archive/t-298908.html

http://lifestream.gatewayy.net/items/view/875

http://forum.transmissionbt.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4564&start=240

http://skwpspace.com/2008/05/20/disabling-spindump-on-osx-to-prevent-slowdown-af ter-a-crash/

http://www.archivum.info/uk.comp.sys.mac/2008-06/msg01972.html

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Answer 5

Jun 8, 2009 8:16 PM in response to esoterica

THANK YOU for this info. i keep seeing spindump popping up and chewing up cycles whenever an app goes unresponsive for a short time. i hope this is remedied in snow leopard...

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Answer 6

gcrump

Level 1

14 points

Jun 19, 2009 4:12 AM in response to bunnyhero

I have been noticing a slowdown more recently as well and couldn't pin it down but found that Spindump was the culprit. I hope too this is resolved in Snow L.

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Answer 7

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,300 points

Jun 19, 2009 5:01 AM in response to esoterica

Spindump does cause issues on some machines as noted. However, I've never had a problem, along with millions of others. Based on other people's posts, I tried to find a cause/solution but couldn't.

Some people did find your solution worked, but others did not.

Making pleas to Apple on this User to User forum will most certainly go unnoticed.

Get a free membership to ADC and file a bug report.

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Answer 8

Jun 23, 2009 8:56 PM in response to esoterica

I found that launchd keeps trying to restart spindump every 10 seconds. A better solution may be simply not to load it:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist
A discussion about this, with links to the original references, may be found here:
http://jamesreubenknowles.com/disable-spindump-71

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