CrashReporter and spindump in Leopard

[Mikuro]

Ever since I upgraded to Leopard, I've noticed something strange every time an application crashes. Whereas in Tiger the application would simply disappear, in Leopard I get a spinning beachball, my CPU usage soars, and my disk thrashes. This goes on for about 30 seconds, and THEN the application disappears.

When I take a look in Activity Monitor to see what's going on, I see two processes using large amounts of CPU time: CrashReporter and spindump. I believe CrashReporter existed in Tiger, but I don't recall seeing spindump before.

I went into Console to check the logs, and nothing seems out of place. There were some crash reports there, same as in Tiger. Spindump left a message saying "/usr/sbin/spindump[22285] process 18699 is being monitored" in the system log (18699 being the ID of the crashing program).

This delay and resource hogging is much more annoying than the crash itself. Is there any way to disable these processes?

I have already set OS X not to alert me when application crash (using TinkerTool). This did not affect CrashReporter's or spindump's performance, though.

And has anyone else noticed this problem?

[Mikuro]

I still haven't found a real solution. I also haven't found anyone else with the same problem, which makes me wonder what the heck is going on with my system.

It's really driving me nuts right now, while debugging apps I'm writing in XCode. When they crash, it takes several minutes of full CPU usage until they really disappear from the Dock. If I keep going, I wind up with two or three instances in the Dock crashing at once!

For now I'm going into Terminal and entering this command:

sudo killall -c "spindump" && sudo killall -c "ReportCrash"

Which, as you may have guessed, instantly kills the two offending system processes, which in turn lets the actual crashing applications finally disappear. Ahhh, sweet relief. It's still annoying, but at least it's not killing my productivity anymore.

I guess the only thing left to do is file a bug report to Apple.

[John Sawyer]

I just saw the same spindump process, in Activity Monitor, after I used a utility ("Pause", part of the "Toolbar Extras" suite) to pause the activity of the Safari process, since Safari keeps exhibiting those wonderful complete stalls on my Mac, several times a day, and I wanted to just halt it rather than quit from it altogether since I have several windows open in Safari I'd rather not lose, or have to tediously bookmark. As soon as I paused Safari (an option that would be nice to have in Activity Monitor), spindump appeared in the list of processes, and disappeared after about a half-minute or so, same as your experience time-wise. So, you don't have to outright force-quit a process to get spindump to start up. Hope that helps to some degree.

[elvey]

I've seen Force Quit (Apple-option-esc) repeatably cause spindump to run - that is, just opening Force Quit, without actually force-quitting anything!