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

bjanzen

Nicoloco & Tim -

In Finder, type Command-Shift-g and type ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ This directory contains all the crashes on your machine. You can send us a typical SketchUp crash.

Tim, yours messages point to WindowServer unable to create swap space. Is your hard drive nearly full, or are you running a lot of screens in Spaces? You posted that WindowServer threw errors - is WindowServer still running? If you remote'd in, do a "ps aux | grep Window" command is WindowServer there? You can also run "top", type "o" (to sort on) then "cpu" to sort on cpu usage. WindowServer will always be near the top. If it didn't crash, what's the memory usage (my machine, just typical usage, is 130 MB real memory, 500 MB virtual memory). If this is crashing or messed up, we can contact Apple and work with them to find out what's going on.

Please do or continue to send data (crash logs, system profiles, etc..) to

http://sketchup.google.com/support/bin/request.py

I'm still of the belief that your situations are unique - we have lots of users in 10.5.6 with zero problems, so we'll try to determine what's going on for you.

b

tim

@bjanzen said:

In Finder, type Command-Shift-g and type ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/ This directory contains all the crashes on your machine. You can send us a typical SketchUp crash.

There is just a single crash report - and that relates to a SU 6 crash that happened while I was trying to see if 6 had the same problem. It seems that SU itself is not actually crashing in any form that leaves a report.

@unknownuser said:

Tim, yours messages point to WindowServer unable to create swap space. Is your hard drive nearly full, or are you running a lot of screens in Spaces? You posted that WindowServer threw errors - is WindowServer still running? If you remote'd in, do a "ps aux | grep Window" command is WindowServer there? You can also run "top", type "o" (to sort on) then "cpu" to sort on cpu usage. WindowServer will always be near the top. If it didn't crash, what's the memory usage (my machine, just typical usage, is 130 MB real memory, 500 MB virtual memory). If this is crashing or messed up, we can contact Apple and work with them to find out what's going on.

I have 150Gb free space on my 300Gb disk. I don't run Spaces at all (nor dashboard for that matter). I do have a secondary 20" display on the 24" iMac. Typically I have the tool windows on that surface.
Next time the system locks up I'll take a look with ps and report

Thanks for looking into this!

bjanzen

OK, scouring the net, iMac's have had reports of overheating on gaming & OpenGL apps. I've replaced a personal one myself. At this point, I'd try 3 things:

Getting a menu bar temperature meter, maybe something like http://islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/
Unplug the second monitor for a day and see if you crash.
Stop playing World of Warcraft every coffee break . OK, maybe just 1 and 2; this one's important.

Barry

Gaieus

I didn't know WoW was release for the Mac!
I'll change platforms immediately!

(Barry, can you arrange a shift from the Windows license to the Mac for me?)

tim

@bjanzen said:

OK, scouring the net, iMac's have had reports of overheating on gaming & OpenGL apps. I've replaced a personal one myself. At this point, I'd try 3 things:

Getting a menu bar temperature meter, maybe something like http://islayer.com/apps/istatmenus/

Been using one ever since my first iMac had this problem and got replaced within a couple of days of buying it. No apparent temp issues with this unit.

@unknownuser said:

Unplug the second monitor for a day and see if you crash.

Owwww, Mum.... no, don't make me do that. It's not fair. Yuck. OK, I'll try it. The things I do to help people out, I dunno....

@unknownuser said:

Stop playing World of Warcraft every coffee break . OK, maybe just 1 and 2; this one's important.

Never played it. Why would I downgrade to simulated violence when I can just - well, never mind, you don't need to know about my day job?

Today's little test result - I turned off hardware acceleration (Oh my goodness.... it....... is...... so....... sloooooooowwww) and the crash is exactly the same. The same address is being reported as not freeable (0xa063a6d8) and the windowlog has the same complaint about destination buffer to small for y index (3852). And I clean forgot to log in from the other machine to look at the process list. Rats.

tim

OK, same error with the external display disconnected. Exactly the same errors etc.

This time I remembered to log in from the macbook and this is what it said:-

Diziet;~ tim$ ps aux | grep Wind
_windowserver    94   0.0 44.8  2605312 1878828   ??  Us    4;56PM   7;33.79 /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Resources/WindowServer -daemon

and

Diziet;~ tim$ ps aux | grep Sk
tim        739   0.0  0.0    86524   1204   ??  Ss    5;45PM   0;01.28 /Applications/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp.app/Contents/Resources/SketchUpDaemon 14639
tim        738   0.0  8.4  2485168 351256   ??  S     5;45PM   5;36.58 /Applications/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp.app/Contents/MacOS/SketchUp -psn_0_241723

A note I don't think I've mentioned previously - the mouse cursor is still responsive to the mouse, so some part of the graphics system is still running ok and it can't really be something like the GPU overheating.

Christopher Love

Tim,
Just getting this up to the top of the list again. I too have started experiencing UI freezes, its not isolated. Only occurs whilst using SU. Very annoying. Sounds like I have a similar setup. Running an external monitor off the latest MacBook Pro. Just wondering wether or not some of the ruby scripts that I use could be causing the problem. Smustards dashed lines runs like a dog on V7, dont know that I could live without it.

Console log error message attached

(1000)
13/02/09 5:15:30 PM SketchUp[442] _NSShapePlainWindow: error setting window shape (1000)
13/02/09 5:15:30 PM SketchUp[442] _NXPlaceWindow: error setting window shape (1000)

Seriously considering going back to V6

Any suggestions greatfully recieved

Regards
Chris

tim

@christopher love said:

Tim,
Just getting this up to the top of the list again. I too have started experiencing UI freezes, its not isolated. Only occurs whilst using SU. Very annoying. Sounds like I have a similar setup. Running an external monitor off the latest MacBook Pro. Just wondering wether or not some of the ruby scripts that I use could be causing the problem.

Hmm, it's probably not any (non-standard) rubys at fault since I'm currently running a totally vanilla SUP7 install to avoid any possible conflicts.

Can it really be true that my WindowServer is trying to use 44% of all memory? (see the ps aux output in my previous message? That must imply a truly staggering memory leak or abuse somewhere.

tim

OK, I thought I'd try running with the Activity Monitor open to see what happened to WindowServer memory usage.
Wow, what a surprise. It starts at 75Mb (75 fricken megabytes! What the blazes is using 75 damn megabytes? I used to run an OS, Smalltalk, a DTP, a programming editor etc in 4 megabytes! The World Has Gone Mad!)

Start SU - jump to 93Mb (eek!) and within 10 minutes of moderate use where I added a single component - basically a pointy stick - to the house model, the RSIZE number had climbed to a staggering 450Mb. Now that my friends is a memory leak. Someone call in the Army Corp. of Engineers with bulldozers to plug that levee.

Added point - I have 4Gb in my iMac. This might possibly be relevant because of the distinct possibility that some code somewhere is treating a pointer as an integer and falling foul of the top bit of the address and going all wobbly. Not that I have ever made such a mistake. No sir, no way. Never.

tim

OK, more news of strange memory growth bugs -
Amongst many tests I decided to try importing the house model into a new file; this because on a whim I tried a new, empty, file just because. To my immense surprise, the new file with the old model imported did not result in rapid memory usage growth. To make life more fun, I got three kernel protection failure crashes. Oh joy.

I ran the hardware diagnostics and got the all clear from them. I retried the 'new' file and it seemed ok. I even tired the original file and.... no memory explosion. I had not added any new software, updated any software or done anything that I could even faintly imagine having any effect on this issue.

I am now officially baffled.

bjanzen

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. As I've mentioned before, I have one of these at home, and on ANY application, this thing would lock up and crash at random times. I took it back to my local Apple store twice when I thought I could reproduce it at the Genius Bar and failed, and on the third time they knew I was going to return it for good and buy a new one, so they just straight-up exchanged it. Zero problems since.

Kernel panics often indicate bad hw. If this were a specific SketchUp problem on this machine with this graphic card, we'd have some real numbers to reflect that.

tim

@bjanzen said:

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

@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

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

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

@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

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

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

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

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!