I built a spawner that is completely overpowered in 1.8 and it worked flawlessly, but in 1.9 there seems to be a weird bug where it doesn't work as efficient in survival as it does in creative, I will upload a few screenshots in the near future, but it might just be happening because my world is the middle of an ocean, but I've noticed about a 98% inefficiency in survival as compared to creative, this is a vanilla spawner that I have come up with myself, so you might have put something in that broke it, but like I said, it might be purely location.
Is this still an issue in the most recent versions (currently that is 1.10.2, or 16w42a) of Minecraft? If so, please update the affected versions and help us keeping this ticket updated from time to time. If you are the owner/reporter of this ticket, you can modify the affected version(s) yourself.