»In which we use ktrace and kdump

OSX just works, right?
No. Lately the number and variety of problems afflicting my relatively new Mac Book Pro feels like the tasks of Heracles have beset me. Or, worse, that I can only solve problems such as the Finder going away by rebooting. That feels icky. Or, more technically, it is ass-backwards.
Most intriguingly, processes, even native Apple applications like Mail and Safari, go out to lunch and never return. Forcibly quitting them, either through the Force Quit dialog, is effective but unsatisfying.

I cannot type more than four characters in an HTML form without Safari entering a death spiral (I call this a spiral, although the call graph provided by Activity Monitor shows nothing, nothing).

Reading through the ps man page teaches me a lot about wayward processes in BSD, but I am still not convinced I know what is happening. The moribund E state that some processes find themselves means that the kernel is waiting to complete some i/o for the process; perhaps network, perhaps disk. What sort of i/o would Quicksilver get hung up on?

In fact, while I was looking for more information about debugging tools for OSX, Safari crashed in a spectacular way.