SUpro 7 on OSX 10.5.6 locks up entire UI for all apps

tim · 4 Mar 2009, 06:52

I would call AppleCare (1-800-APL-CARE), or proceed to Apple's Genius Bar with machine in tow at:

701 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, British Columbia V7Y 1G5
(778) 373-1800

I still feel that you have a funky machine.

It's not impossible, of course. I'm not very likely to be able to visit the apple store in vancouver any time soon though; Vancouver Island (in particular the mid-isle area where I live) is a long way from Vancouver. Timewise it's a bit like suggesting to a Londoner that they take their machine to Paris! I can actually see the sun glinting off the skyscrapers in Van on occasion but getting there involves a 2hr drive, a 2hr ferry, another hour plus drive and then, shudder, navigating around Van. And then back...
As I mentioned above the problem has gone away, at least for now. I still see very frequent complaints about a failure of deallocaton, always the same address, but the memory usage in WindowServer does not rapidly balloon any more. Really, really, weird.

Nicoloco · 4 Mar 2009, 16:29

@tim said:

I still feel that you have a funky machine.

I still find it odd that this computer has been fine for a year or so, without freezing once and then it freezes all the time with Sketchup 7 Pro. Not sure how to help find the problem as it leaves no Crash Logs. There seem to be a few others affected over on the Sketchup Community Boards as well and with a large range of machines.

And how come it has happened on a Mac Pro, a MacBook and an iMac 24" in our office...none of which had ever 'frozen' before. The only thing they had in common was running Sketchup 7 Pro on OSX 10.5.6 at the time of the crash?

bjanzen · 4 Mar 2009, 17:52

I should have been more clear: I believe Tim's problem was an intermittent hw problem.

Yours does not sound like that. Now, how to chase that down? Since it's on a range of machines at your company, I'm leaning towards (1) something unique in your models. Can you whittle it down to be reproduced consisitently. (2) something about your network / computer setup (are home directories local? Are you running Mac OS X Server), and maybe a discussion with your IT guy might help. Other ideas?

b

bjanzen · 4 Mar 2009, 23:29

Just another thought to Nick et al, when you have issues like these and the entire machine (not just SketchUp) goes out:

Read http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564 and try it (booting in safe mode), to see if it changes anything. First one to report a machine crash in SketchUp in safe boot mode wins a... um... a pony.

b

tim · 5 Mar 2009, 06:30

@bjanzen said:

Just another thought to Nick et al, when you have issues like these and the entire machine (not just SketchUp) goes out:

Read http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1564 and try it (booting in safe mode), to see if it changes anything. First one to report a machine crash in SketchUp in safe boot mode wins a... um... a pony.

b

You do understand that 'a pony' means $500, right. Well, technically, 500 GBP but what the hell google is a USA company.

bjanzen · 12 Mar 2009, 20:31

pony = $500? Reminds me of a joke: know how to make a little money in horses? Answer: start with a LOT of money. By the way, the pony I offered is still safe in my corral munching on his oats... .

I'll take the liberty of posting here exactly what I said in

http://groups.google.com/group/Sketchup-Pro/browse_thread/thread/8f43b383f71ac697/e0a0ea3903d3f879

I've figured out (thanks to smart Googlers) how to load your video
driver in safe mode, and I can share if anyone is interested (running
in safe mode, but notice slowness in using SketchUp). Essentially, you mark your video
driver as essential for safe mode (see http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KEXTConcept/KEXTConceptLoading/loading_kexts.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20002369-97632-BABIAICJ)

To refresh: I wanted people to try this, mainly because it eliminates
the many variations from software installs. We've been running many
many machines without system crashes or hangs, so we need to figure
out what is unique about each of your situations. If your system
hangs, applications crash, or the system panics, please take a look at
the appropriate files in /Library/Logs/PanicReporter, HangReporter,
and CrashReporter and send them to us if they're SketchUp related with
notes about what you were doing when this happened. Try to recreate
it if you can (although I know that's painful and you really don't
want to see it happen again). We need to clean up this thread so it offers useful information, and not just "yes, I crashed one time, too, on a Mac". Having said that, I do appreciate your contributions to finding out the causes of these, because I know it's a pain in the...(related to pony).

Barry

tim · 18 Mar 2009, 01:33

Aaaaaargh. It's started happening again. WindowServer lockup after a couple of hours work. After rebooting I tested various things including removing all plugins, opening a new model, importing my old model into a new model, removing all textures etc etc. None made any difference; the memory usage just ticks up and up. Even the completely empty model does it.

There were no crash logs created, same as before. There were hundreds of

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] SketchUp(959,0xa0353720) malloc; *** error for object 0xa02606d8; Non-aligned pointer being freed

type error messages logged.

Possibly related (but maybe not) I got some really curios complaints on my last quit of SU -

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);3081; warning; parenthesize argument(s) for future version 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);3104; warning; parenthesize argument(s) for future version 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = Units 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 0.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = StampOffset 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 12.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = GridSpacingX 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 120.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = SmooveRadius 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 4.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = GridSpacingY 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 120.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return> 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106;in `load' 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return> 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/Zorro2.rb;650 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106;in `call' 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return>

and

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] /var/pulse/data/recipes/5374103/base/src/googleclient/sketchup/source/sketchup/macapp/MaterialUtils.mm;596; failed assertion `0'

for example.

OK, so I'll try this 'safe-mode' stuff and see if it still happens. I may be projecting from years of experience in developing virtual machines for object languages but this does seem awfully like a garbage collection bug in the Ruby interpreter.

bjanzen · 25 Mar 2009, 20:33

OK, here's and update (posted to sketchucation and Google Groups). I chose to work with two folks who were experiencing "SketchUp Leopard" crash / hang issues, and try to drill down what the issues were.

Case 1: Machine gets unusable using SketchUp 7. Symptom - it was determined that WindowServer (the UI-serving application for Macs) memory usage continues to grow. We took the same SketchUp Model and iMac model and couldn't reproduce the problem. We booted in Safe Mode (to eliminate non-essential kernel extensions) but this runs in software rendering mode. We then added the video driver to render OpenGL on the graphics card. No changes. We even called Apple support, and they were stumped. Best suggestion: take the machine (now out of AppleCare warranty) to the nearest Genius Bar. While SketchUp helps manifest the problem, it's a hardware + Mac OS X issue (/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/WindowServer for the curious).

Case 2: Machine crashes frequently while using SketchUp on Leopard. Looking at the crash stacks (/Library/Logs/CrashReporter), we narrowed this down to two likely culprits: a printer driver, and ruby plugins. For the printer issue, I did some googling on Epson printers. Two things made me nervous about this. First, it was a printer that's only sold in some countries so not likely a printer driver that has millions of users. Second, the printer driver used ESC/P (Epson Standard Code for Printers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P and specifically a raster to ESC/P driver). Older than PCL, IIRC (and that's 1984ish). Someone had reported that Epson support had suggested switching to Gutenprint (formerly Gimp-Print, at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/). So far, this seems to have helped. For the ruby plugin issue, there's no easy way to troubleshoot 200+ ruby scripts that likely range from zero-to-limited software testing. A good rule of thumb for any program with plugins: when you run into trouble, try unloading some of these and keeping only the necessary ones and add in over time. My suggestion was to binary tree them, i.e. add 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 etc... to eliminate a potential crasher. We're thinking about ways for us to comprehensively test our ruby API and to help plugin writers test their code as well. Feedback welcome on this issue.

So why did I do this and what did we learn?

I understand that users of SketchUp are often professionals who often spend their entire day in front of the product, so crashes and hangs are VERY frustrating. I'd like to thank the two people who when beyond that frustration and helped us track down these issues in greater detail. Hopefully, this greater-than-typical level of detail will be helpful to others if you have to chase down issues like this.

Nicoloco · 27 May 2009, 09:25

Barry,

Thank you for looking into things. I have found a third answer to the same symptoms.

Crashes started getting more and more frequent.
Reinstalled OSX (10.5.7) from scratch, erasing the hard drive (having backed everything up).
Installed Sketchup 7 ONLY.
Crashes still happening and even more frequently. Started noticing graphical glitches when using other programs and hangs when moving between windows in the finder. Kernel Panic logs included the word 'NVidia' a lot.
Looked into issues with the NVidia 7300GT in my Mac Pro. It appears that they have a penchance for 'frying' and are 'falling like flies'.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1831300&start=0&tstart=0
No longer under warranty so replaced the 7300GT with the NVidia GeForce 8800 GT from the Apple Store
http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB560Z/A?mco=NDY5ODA0MQ
Re-instated my account.
Sketchup works like a dream again. In fact it is much much faster; the same large model that was crashing constantly now orbits with the shadows on...

My conclusions:

The graphics card in my machine was faulty. However this was probably only affecting some of the components...those which are used by certain OpenGL operations. Therefore Sketchup was experiencing the brunt of the the problems. Over time the problem got worse. Booting in Safe Mode seemed to fix matters because was no longer accessing the damaged components (unfortunately neither was Sketchup and it was painfully slow). Would recommend the 8800GT as an upgrade to any 1st Gen Mac Pro/Sketchup Pro user whether or not they are experiencing the hang issues, as it has significantly speeded things up (512Mb memory). £166 well spent.

Thanks again for your help and apologies for assuming that the problem was with Sketchup. Hopefully I won't be back to say that it's just crashed again!

jeff hammond · 27 May 2009, 14:37

my 7300 went haywire as well.. (and you probably read a post by me on the discussion forum you linked to).. like you, i got a 8800 and everything is fine (well, better)again.

outersketcher · 13 Jul 2009, 19:33

I'm running the free version on SketchUp 7 on my 24" screen imac with system 10.5.7.

I can't run SketchUp 7 for more than 10 minutes before it crashes.

SketchUP 6 ran GREAT on my system. But SketchUp 7 crashes consistantly within minutes of opening up a file. Sometimes I lose all access to the rest of the computer and sometimes just SketchUp crashes.

I'm using several ruby plugins... specifically the following...

Unfold
Joint Push/Pull
Set Center Point
Skin
Bezier tools

The only thing that has changed is the introduction of SketchUp 7.

Would love to go back to the previous version. Where the program ran strong and dependably. Is it possible to save a version7 file down to a version6?

I sifted through my consule window and pulled out the common error lines immediately after the last crash.

7/13/09 11:34:38 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] SketchUp(1014,0xa01c1720) malloc: *** error for object 0xa005e6d8: pointer being freed was not allocated

7/13/09 11:36:29 AM SketchUp[1014] _NXPlaceWindow: error setting window shape (1000)

7/13/09 11:36:29 AM SketchUp[1014] _NSShapePlainWindow: error setting window shape (1000)

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/bezierspline.rb:2223: warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/libtraductor.rb:59: warning: don't put space before argument parentheses

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/LibTraductor.rb:25: warning: already initialized constant LBT__DEF

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] Bus Error

7/13/09 11:36:43 AM com.apple.launched[72] ([0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014]) Exited abnormally: Abort trap

The most common line is the one about "pointer being freed was not allocated" whatever that means..

I know that error code lines I've posted are similar to those posted by Tim. But, I dunno... I doubt that it's a hardware thing since SketchUp 6 ran just fine. I began experiencing these miserable crashes only after I downloaded and installed SketchUp 7.

Any ideas from you more computer savvy folks?

David

tim · 14 Jul 2009, 03:46

@outersketcher said:

I'm running the free version on SketchUp 7 on my 24" screen imac with system 10.5.7.

I can't run SketchUp 7 for more than 10 minutes before it crashes.

Ah. Forgot to update people on recent discoveries. On my machine (a new 24" iMac with the 4850 graphics card - jolly nice and fast by the way) the problem was just the same, so clearly not a random hardware problem.

It actually seems to be the Component browser. If I have that open, boom in short order - though more like an hour than 10 minutes) memory used up etc. If I open it and then close it - still the problem. If I run without ever opening it - no problem at all.

Very weird and rather inconvenient since I end up (ab)using the outliner (with all its deranged buglets) as a sort of ersatz component picker within the model.

outersketcher · 14 Jul 2009, 20:46

That's interesting Tim.... I tried something yesterday that shouldn't have made any difference at all.

I re-downloaded SketchUp 6 and installed it onto my computer. Tried unsuccessfully to find a way to convert the version 7 files I'm currently working on to version 6.

The really weird thing is that SketchUp 7 hasn't crashed on me even once since I've uploade version 6.

I don't understand how that could've changed anything. Have been using SketchUp for about 3 hours now.

And yes, like Tim, I'm not using the component window, but I am using all of my rubys.

David

bjanzen · 14 Jul 2009, 22:33

My first thought would be to move the ruby plugins aside for a bit and see if you still see crashing in 10 minutes. That should be easy to try. If crashes go away, add in 1/2 and retry, then add 1/2 again, and binary tree the sucker until you find the culprit.

If you do crash without any ruby scripts in your plugins directory, I'd send the crash report (copy it in an e-mail, don't send to Apple) either here or to SketchUp's Help menu->Contact Us with a bug.

Tim's issue is still puzzling because we still can't reproduce it, but we're getting closer, and Nicoloco, glad to see you're running better these days.

b

@outersketcher said:

I'm running the free version on SketchUp 7 on my 24" screen imac with system 10.5.7.

I can't run SketchUp 7 for more than 10 minutes before it crashes.

SketchUP 6 ran GREAT on my system. But SketchUp 7 crashes consistantly within minutes of opening up a file. Sometimes I lose all access to the rest of the computer and sometimes just SketchUp crashes.

I'm using several ruby plugins... specifically the following...

Unfold
Joint Push/Pull
Set Center Point
Skin
Bezier tools

The only thing that has changed is the introduction of SketchUp 7.

Would love to go back to the previous version. Where the program ran strong and dependably. Is it possible to save a version7 file down to a version6?

I sifted through my consule window and pulled out the common error lines immediately after the last crash.

7/13/09 11:34:38 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] SketchUp(1014,0xa01c1720) malloc: *** error for object 0xa005e6d8: pointer being freed was not allocated

7/13/09 11:36:29 AM SketchUp[1014] _NXPlaceWindow: error setting window shape (1000)

7/13/09 11:36:29 AM SketchUp[1014] _NSShapePlainWindow: error setting window shape (1000)

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/bezierspline.rb:2223: warning: parenthesize argument(s) for future version

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/libtraductor.rb:59: warning: don't put space before argument parentheses

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/LibTraductor.rb:25: warning: already initialized constant LBT__DEF

7/13/09 11:36:30 AM [0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014] Bus Error

7/13/09 11:36:43 AM com.apple.launched[72] ([0x0-0x46046].com.google.sketchupfree7[1014]) Exited abnormally: Abort trap

The most common line is the one about "pointer being freed was not allocated" whatever that means..

I know that error code lines I've posted are similar to those posted by Tim. But, I dunno... I doubt that it's a hardware thing since SketchUp 6 ran just fine. I began experiencing these miserable crashes only after I downloaded and installed SketchUp 7.

Any ideas from you more computer savvy folks?

David

Gaieus · 22 Jul 2009, 19:50

@outersketcher said:

...Tried unsuccessfully to find a way to convert the version 7 files I'm currently working on to version 6...

Well, while I won't save the Mac World for sure, you should be able to save our SU 7 files into SU 6 format - in SU 7 of course in the File > Save as... and use the pulldown at the bottom to save it in various previous formats (must be something similar on the Mac and a couple of seconds/minutes should be enough):

tim · 16 Sept 2009, 18:27

So far (touch wood textured component) it seems that Snow Leopard has stopped the problem on my iMac. Let's hope it is a permanent fix...

bjanzen · 17 Sept 2009, 00:37

The WindowServer is dead.... long live the WindowServer!

b