tail -f development.log

Every notice how slow and sluggish your OS X Leopard system can be after an application crash?

This is probably because of the spindump utility that OS X launches to create crash and “hang” reports located in /Library/Logs/HangReporter.

This is all fine and good, but spindump has an annoying habit of thrashing your system disk and eating up a sizable chunk of RAM. Personally, the MAJOR annoyance isn’t worth the aggravation just to get a useless “hang” report like the following.

Date/Time:      2008-07-09 16:33:26 -0400
OS Version:     10.5.4 (Build 9E17)
Architecture:   i386
Report Version: 4

Command:        Skitch
Path:           /Applications/Skitch.app/Contents/MacOS/Skitch
Version:        1.0b6.2 (1.0b6.2 (v10678))
Parent:         launchd [107]

PID:            377
Event:          hang
Time:           7.75s
Steps:          1

I’m sure there are many ways to disable this utility, but here is a quick an easy method I used to prevent the “sluggishness” after an app crash

sudo -i
cd /usr/sbin
mv spindump spindump.disabled
ln -s /usr/bin/true /usr/sbin/spindump

Problem solved!