Script Debugger won't force quit

Script Debugger is in a bad state on my mac at the moment. I was running a large script (getting info about every music file in iTunes and syncing those files on the network.

I was getting frequent hangs as happens with scripts working with large lists.

Eventually a hang would stop so I force quit.

But SD is still in the doc as if it were running. When I click on it’s icon it indicates it’s not responding and gives me the option to force quit. Nothing changes. I select the Force Quit menu in the finder and SD is listed (but not in red, which it should be since it’s not responding). I select it and click force quit and nothing happens.

Next I open Activity monitor and SD isn’t listed. It’s still in the Force Quit window and the doc.

Finally I open Terminal and do a killall ‘Script Debugger’ and get
“No matching processes belonging to you were found”

It seems my only recourse is to restart the mac.

When macOS run out of memory, it can thrash. Under these conditions the whole system can become stuck. I’ve had the Dock behave as you describe because of heavy VM paging.

If you give the OS some time it will recover. But a restart is sometimes required.