Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Disabling spindump on OSX to prevent slowdown after a crash

Posted 20 May 2008 @ 7pm | Tagged OSX

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Update: it’s better to use a spindump script that sleeps, otherwise launchd keeps trying to restart it every ten seconds. Thanks to Steve Ryner for the script. And yes, it’s very simple but here it is :-)

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

Sometimes when things crash on OSX (biggest offenders: Quicktime, and Safari playing flash movies), a program called spindump fires up. This offensive piece of bad engineering thinks its ok to eat 100% of my cpu and thrash my disk just to catalog what happened.

While this is a great idea in theory, and I’m sure it helps Apple engineers debug problems, it does absolutely nothing for me trying to bring my machine into a usable state. Fighting spindump for resources while I try to kill the hanging program is not fun. And many people on online forums seem to think the same. Most of the time I’m barely able to pull up the activity monitor and nuke spindump before it goes off to lala land never to return. Granted things don’t crash often, but when they do there is hell to pay.

Well, we don’t have to submit to this madness anymore. It occurred to me that I could simply rename the spindump executable so that OSX could not find it. So I renamed /usr/sbin/spindump to /usr/sbin/spindump.disabled. I had to wait for my first crash in order to verify that this didn’t break anything, and sure enough I had a quicktime crash just the other night. The system promptly recovered from the crash and did not slow down as previously. Mission accomplished!

Apple is a company built on user experience. But spindump is one of the worst user experience violations in OSX. I know there may not be an easy way around it, but certainly at the very least changing the priority of this process so that it’s not able to eat all system resources may be a step in the right direction. I hope to see an improvement in future versions of the operating system. Until then, spindump is dead to me.

Thanks Yan. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with spindump as well – particularly with Safari. We’ll see if this solves the problem.

Unfortuantely, the logs now show launchd trying to fire up spindump every 10 seconds:

5/23/08 9:47:55 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.spindump[5000]) posix_spawnp(“/usr/sbin/spindump”, …): No such file or directory
5/23/08 9:47:55 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.spindump[5000]) Exited with exit code: 1
5/23/08 9:47:55 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.spindump) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

A dummy that returns an “okay” exit code might work.

doh, good catch. I should have checked the logs, I was just so excited to be rid of the evil little bastard :-) I’ll experiment with a dummy script

Actually I think we need a dummy that never exits so launchd doesn’t launch it again. I tried

touch /usr/sbin/spindump
chmod 775 /usr/sbin/spindump

And it’s “better” but still launching every 10 seconds :D

5/23/08 10:13:36 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.spindump) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds
5/23/08 10:13:47 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.spindump) Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

My spindump is now sleeping peacefully :)

I made a dummy that did exit(0) and it didn’t die..launchd was still respawning every 10 seconds. I don’t know why that is.

Also, while we’re on the topic of syslogs I noticed something is trying to spawn httpd and failing to read the log dir. May 23 10:31:52 skwp-mbp org.apache.httpd[3604]: Unable to open logs. Very strange because I ran apache via the Sharing pane and it worked.

Maybe it’s time to reboot this box..it’s been a while.

See, when you exit then it gets relaunched. I’ve mailed you a short script since it’s too embarrassingly stupid to post to your blog :)

Examining logs is always good. There are also scripts to rotate them manually if like me you use a laptop that may not be running when they ‘should’ be cleaned.

I used Steve Ryner’s Script and a template at

http://www.afp548.com/Articles/Jaguar/startupitems.html

to create a startup item for sleeping spindump. I’ve tried it on a couple of known Force Quit simulations after a shutdown/bootup, and it seems to work just fine. Here goes:

at your shell prompt, type:

sudo mkdir /Library/StartupItems/killspindump

then go to that directory and type:

sudo nano killspindump

paste the following text into the file and save and exit:

#!/bin/sh

# Script by Steve Ryner, 2008.
# StartupItem based on “Script to Control Exim” by
# Joel Rennich, http://www.afp548.com, Sept. 2002
# all copyrights waved

. /etc/rc.common

# Script to sleep spindump

# this is to start it

if [ "$1" == "start" ]
then
ConsoleMessage “Sleeping Spindump”
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

# this is to restart it

elif [ "$1" == "restart" ]
then
ConsoleMessage “Resleeping Spindump”
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

fi

That’s the end of the file. Now type:

sudo nano StartupParameters.plist

and paste the following text into the file:

Provides

Spindump Sleep Script

Messages

stop
Waking Spindump
start
Sleeping Spindump

Requires

System Log

OrderPreference
None
Description
Spindump Sleep Script

And that’s the end of the file. Following the instructions at the link above, I made a folder called “Resources” in the killspindump folder. There’s nothing in it, so I don’t know if it’s necessary. Same with the line in the plist file:

stop
Waking Spindump

Obviously my startupitem doesn’t have any code for doing that, but at this point I don’t want to mess with success. Speaking of which, if you try this and it doesn’t work, or you find a better way to do it, let me know.

Whoops. Didn’t realize that the xml file would appear formatted. Here’s the text for the plist file with colons in front of it

:
:
:
:
: Provides
:
: Spindump Sleep Script
:
: Messages
:
: stop
: Waking Spindump
: start
: Sleeping Spindump
:
: Requires
:
: System Log
:
: OrderPreference
: None
: Description
: Spindump Sleep Script
:
:

Sorry for the difficulties, but I’ve already spent enough time on this. I’m not going to relearn HTML tonight :P

Wow, that didn’t work either. If anyone is interested in this and CAN format HTML properly, let me know how and I’ll repost it.

Hey Andrew thanks!
Try http://pastie.org/ for pasting complex things :-)

Thanks, Yan!

Here’s a link to the contents of “killspindump”:

http://pastie.org/207662

Here’s a link to the contents of “StartupParameters.plist”:

http://pastie.caboo.se/207665

If you click the “Download” button on those pages I believe it will download them as a shell script and an html file respectively, so you might only have to rename the files and create the directories. Otherwise, just create the files per my 1st post, follow the pastie links, click the “View” button on those pages, and then just copy and paste the text into the files. Best of luck, and please let me know if this doesn’t work for you.

Try using Lingon. Lingon allows you to edit the launchd items. I would think you could just delete the spindump entry from launchd, thus preventing it from loading, ever.

[...] Yan Pritzker’s blog I found some great tips. Patrick suggested the following: sudo launchctl unload [...]

Unfortunately, the plist item is still b0rked.

Yeah.. such a pain…but during my google quest regarding this issue i found on some post this little free leopard tool. ***** Lingon.app – http://tuppis.com/lingon/ “Lingon is a graphical user interface for creating an editing launchd configuration files for Mac OS X Leopard 10.5″ thank you Peter Borg.

stupid me… :) was here posted by Barney15e :)
sorry.

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist

Excellent – thanks! Personally, I like the extra degree of continuity better

than I like looking like another Yahoo customer.

Heh, I just did the following:

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

Problem solved!

[...] to Alex (a commenter at skwpspace) for this little tidbit for effectively disabling spindump on OSX. sudo -i cd /usr/sbin/ mv [...]

Thank you, now i know what spindump is, and i dont need it anymore :-)

This was driving me freakin nuts! Thanks so much.

Hi,

Totally agree Spindump is a pita. There should be an option in System Preferences to disable spindump alltogether.
Don’t know much about Unix so can someone please explain where I would have to put the lines of code, mentioned at the beginning of this article and how this script should be called (I suppose Spindump, but does it need some kind of suffix like in Windows ?)

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
sleep 60000
done

Thanks for the help

Stop launchctl from loading it in the first place:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist

the ‘-w’ makes the change persistent.

Hi guys

I m trying to run the scripts on script editor but i always get the inspiring message “Expected expression but found end of line.

I understand next to nothing about programming so…

Any help, please?

thanx

Thanks. I like to suspend some of my applications when I’m running my laptop on battery power, and spindump would kick in and drain the battery – I’d suspend an app using 3% CPU and find spindump kicked in at 15 or even 20% of CPU. This script has prevented that from occurring.