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Spin Reports

  • December 18, 2014
  • 1 reply
  • 16 views
J
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I didn't really see much when i did a google search and JN search on "Apple Spin Reports", so maybe someone here can give me information on them.

Seeing some ".wakeups_resource.spin" and ".cpu_resource.spin" files on our Mac's. Can someone link me to Apple documentation on what these are and what action should be taken when they're created?

I did see this: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/spindump.8.html

But it didn't go into much detail other then letting me know they likely get created when an application gets force quit. "OS X Support Essentials" course apparently didn't go into this topic.

Thanks

    1 reply

    mm2270
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    • mm2270
    • Legendary Contributor
    • December 18, 2014

    Are you also seeing indications of "excessive wakeups" in your Console logs? Sometimes the two coincide.

    My very rudimentary understanding of the wakeups issue is that, starting mostly in Mavericks, Apple put a lot of development into extending the battery life of the Mac since laptops make such a large % of their user base. Part of battery conservation means spinning up the CPU for tasks as infrequently as possible, so letting the CPU sit in an idle or sleeping state to save that battery.
    Mavericks will now report on, and in some extreme cases, attempt to shut down, any processes or applications that cause the CPU to spin up from a sleep state excessively.

    We saw this issue rear its head when we moved over to 10.9.x and had an older, but supposedly Mavericks compatible version of McAfee Endpoint Security installed on them. Basically, McAfee was causing the Mac to keep the CPU spun up nearly constantly, especially at login, as it tried to tell the OS to scan every conceivable file being accessed or cached for malware (a bit overzealous) This unfortunately caused the Mac to freeze up as the OS attempted to stop the extreme amount of CPU usage being asked for by McAfee. McAfee of course tried to do its job, and it resulted in a complete lock up of the Mac, sometimes almost indefinitely, and in some cases, for 5-10 minutes at login.
    The errors that showed up in the logs at the time of the lock up noted that 'McAfee Security was caught causing excessive wakeup calls'.
    We were also noting some spin dump reports showing up in the asl logs in Console that were related to this.

    So, do you have anything you can think of that may be doing something like that, or otherwise causing the CPU to spin up a lot? It might also just be a bad application that's crashing at some point.

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