According to Apple, Spindump is something you manually activate in order to prepare a report about an app that is hanging. The act of preparing the report can be massively CPU intensive, and the results are generally only useful to the developer of the hanging app.
I think this report is also auto-generated when you force-quit a non-responsive app, but I’m not sure about that.
You should be able to safely kill this task. Doing so will abandon the report generation, but shouldn’t break anything.
Maybe, but based on what I’ve read so far, it is only triggered as a part of force-quitting a non-responsive app or by request via the Activity Monitor.
I agree that’s what the documentation suggests, but I am surprised by that. I always keep Activity Monitor open, and I notice spindump running every now and then, including after reboots. I wonder if Apple is a little loose with defining “force quits” in some of its documentation, or perhaps a script is misbehaving on my system.
Note that my main observations of spindump initiation were during beta testing. Beta software runs with many differences from release software, such as traps which can indicate code in need of attention. Public documentation refers to the release version, from which these traps may have been removed, at least mostly. But the observed initiation of spindump while the software is beachballing tells us the traps are still in place, still reporting problems which block progress for too long. It seems likely that the traps are set to be insensitive to delays expected in normal operation, and thus not normally activated. But when a problem leads to a delay sufficient to trigger beachballing, spindump is also triggered to flag the error for developers’ attention. Seems to me this I how it should work.
So do not force-quit spindump. Let it run, so the problem can be reported and hopefully fixed. If you determine a series of actions which reproducibly lead to the beachball, file Feedback describing the actions and include the spindump report.
Don’t expect any response from Apple. If you have the time and feel public-spirited, when the next beta is released, replicate and report the problem again. Sometimes Apple fixes these things. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a fix.
