I’m reporting a severe reproducible issue in Instruments, specifically when using the SwiftUI instrument and opening Show Cause & Effect Graph.
What happens: • Instruments becomes extremely laggy/unresponsive • The graph/detail area can turn solid magenta/pink • Memory usage rapidly increases (I observed around 18 GB, 25 GB, and up to 34 GB) • My Mac has crashed/restarted during this, or in other terms, had a kernel panic, where my Mac froze, and everything unresponsive. The Trackpad wouldn't even click.
Important detail: • I could not find a generated kernel panic log after the crash/restart.
Repro context: • SwiftUI iOS app profiled from Xcode • Trigger is specifically entering Show Cause & Effect Graph • Recordings can be short and still trigger it • Issue is much less severe or absent if I avoid that view
What I already tried: • Rebooting • Short captures / fewer instruments • Clearing Xcode/Instruments caches/preferences • Retesting after cleanup • Reinstalling Xcode
- Is this a known Instruments regression?
- Is there a workaround besides avoiding Show Cause & Effect Graph?
- What exact diagnostics should I collect when no kernel panic file is generated?
Specs: Xcode Version 26.3 (17C529) Instruments Version 26.3 (17C529) macOS Version 26.4 Beta (25E5223i) MacBook Pro 13-inch, M1, 2020, 16 GB RAM