The spindump process detects and collects information about crashing processes. While this is great and all, it doesn't always work and spindump itself hangs indefinitely, taking with it an entire processor pegged at 97% usage. Uhg. Sometimes an application is unresponsive because it is very busy doing some type of IO. I get spindump hogging cycles when I am copying movie data from one disk to another in iMovie. With spindump running, my system basically becomes unusable. You can read the spindump manpage for more info on this process.
To disable it permanently:
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist
Re-enabling it is just as easy:
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.spindump.plist
Thanks to James Knowles for this tip:
http://jamesreubenknowles.com/disable-spindump-71
