What is "signpost_reporter"?

Solution 1:

Signposts is a developer feature created by Apple to help developers diagnose performance problems in applications.

Essentially developer can create a “signpost” marking the beginning and end of performance critical operations. The signpost system then automatically times these intervals and makes them available to profiling tools on the local machine.

The signpost_reporter program is used to report these timings back to Apple. I.e. it allows Apple to monitor performance on non-developer machines by sending the telemetry data from the signpost feature to Apple. For example Apple might be interested in knowing how often customers experience problems with a specific feature being too slow.

Without seeing the actual log entry, it’s not possible to say why you got a log entry for it. However rest assured that your system works just as well with and without the signpost_reporter.

Solution 2:

The manual page for signpost_reporter states:

NAME

signpost_reporter -- Report telemetry on intervals instrumented with os_signpost to Apple

SYNOPSIS

signpost_reporter should not be invoked directly

DESCRIPTION

signpost_reporter is responsible for periodically gathering and reporting telemetry about operations instrumented with os_signpost.

os_signpost is a function in macOS for instrumenting specific portions of code:

Marks a point of interest in your code as a time interval or as an event for debugging performance in Instruments.

You can learn more about the logging service of macOS in Apple's developer documentation, Logging.