Comments on: Disable spindump on OS X to prevent system slowdowns

By: Craig

Craig — Sat, 29 May 2010 17:09:55 +0000

@David

It’s really a user preference. The hang report logs created by Spindump are different that the OS X crash logs as you can see from the example I posted.

In some cases Spindump just seems to take 100% CPU and even hundreds of megs of RAM after and app crash. For me, this annoyance makes the output generated by the utility not worth it at all so I choose o turn it off completely and save myself the headache.

By: David

David — Sat, 29 May 2010 15:08:17 +0000

Does this disable the ability to generate crash reports? Are these reports not diagnostically helpful, if not to you, then to whomever at Apple you might speak to, etc.? I honestly am just a tinkerer and even I have learned and fixed things with the reports. My second item (and these are just queries, I do appreciate learning how to disable spindump if need be) is that on my particular Mac, I don’t find (via Activity Monitor) that spindump takes up THAT much CPU, maybe 10-12%. I only googled it just to make sure that it was a legitimate process that was running.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:21:30 +0000

@Eloy,

The four lines of code are meant to be entered into your command prompt (e.g. Terminal.app), not via AppleScript Editor.

Just fire up a terminal and enter the lines one by one (each one is an individual command).

By: Eloy

Eloy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:06:31 +0000

Hi!

I’m trying to get rid of spindump but when I try to run this script on script Editor I always get the error message “Expected end of line, etc., but found identifier.

Can you guys help, please?

Thanx

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 13:09:41 +0000

Thanks, code has been fixed to reflect

cd /usr/sbin

By: Canton

Canton — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:34:04 +0000

Thanks for this.

Yes, line 2 should be

cd /usr/sbin

By: daniel

daniel — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:04:12 +0000

Shouldn’t line 2 be /usr/sbin?
BTW, spindump seems to start even before the crash. It seems to free thing up a bit for safari and Java apps, but that’s just me guessing because I get lots of spindumps, but no crashes for apps that take a lot of time to do their work.