Have started noticing an 'interesting' problem on a number of iMac 24" machines in our office. All of them have an ATI Radeon 2600 card and are running SketchUp Pro 7 (7.0.10248)

In large models (approx 350,000 edges), the sky disappears (white). Turning the sky on and off doesn't make any difference. The same model loaded onto other machines with a different video card (a MacBook Pro with NVIDIA Geforce 8600M GT and a Mac Pro with NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT) still shows the sky.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Barry,

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

1. Crashes started getting more and more frequent.
2. Reinstalled OSX (10.5.7) from scratch, erasing the hard drive (having backed everything up).
3. Installed Sketchup 7 ONLY.
4. 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.
5. 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'.
6. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1831300&start=0&tstart=0
7. No longer under warranty so replaced the 7300GT with the NVidia GeForce 8800 GT from the Apple Store
8. http://store.apple.com/uk/product/MB560Z/A?mco=NDY5ODA0MQ
9. Re-instated my account.
10. 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!

Yes it would.

@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?

Tim,

Thanks. Have made a clean installation of Sketchup 7 Pro as per the Google instructions. Had a look in the console and there are still lots (about 4000 in three seconds...) of the following messages.

09/02/2009 12;11;48 [0x0-0x110110].com.google.sketchuppro7[761] *** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug 

and

09/02/2009 12;11;48 [0x0-0x110110].com.google.sketchuppro7[761] SketchUp(761,0xa077d720) malloc; *** error for object 0xa06eb6d8; Non-aligned pointer being freed 

Have turned off 'Fast Feedback' and left 'Hardware Acceleration' on and this has eliminated the crashing (none yet today) without too much of a performance hit. It doesn't seem to have any effect on the error messages.

Nick

Tim,

Agree with that. Half of our office are still using Sketchup 6 Pro and none of them (out of 10) have reported a crash whilst it is happening to all (6 in total) of the Sketchup 7 Pro users. Everyone is running OSX 10.5.6. Happening to a variety of machines...Mac Pro, Intel iMacs and MacBook Pro. Can't see a common link in terms of video cards as they are a mixture of NVidia and Radeon cards. Turning off 'Hardware Acceleration' fixes the problem in all cases, but makes modelling nearly impossible.

Other programmes that are usually running at the same time:

Safari/Firefox, Mail, AddressBook, CS3, iTunes, Vectorworks 2008, Office.

However, I have started up the computer, disabled all of the startup items, booted it without extensions, not connected to the server and ONLY run Sketchup Pro 7 and the same thing happens.

How did you get the information about where the memory allocation problem was? I will do that next time (at lunchtime) and see if it matches yours.

Nick

Having exactly the same problem on three different machines in the office. System locks up and requires a hard reboot after about 10 minutes. I have filed a bug report with Sketchup and have started a thread on the Goodle Groups Sketchup Pro board.

http://groups.google.com/group/Sketchup-Pro/browse_thread/thread/8f43b383f71ac697/7cb353f62aae219a?hl=en#7cb353f62aae219a

I have discounted Time Machine as we are not using it. Also, my Mac Pro doesn't have an Airport, so I don't think its that. Also, it seems independent of video cards as people with NVidia and ATI Radeon cards are experiencing the same problems.

Interestingly, it is only happening on one particular job and not on another. Both models had been created in SU6 from DWGs and were pretty complex. They have both been purged and checked/fixed. I will try at lunchtime with a completely new SU7 model and see if I can crash it; which should discount the legacy artifact theory.

Other things I have noticed:

1. Turning off 'Hardware Acceleration' seems to make it stable (no crashes in 8 hours of (very slow) use)
2. Turning off 'Auto-Save' seemed to be working, but then experienced an application crash.

Seriously though, I need to get back to doing my job of designing things, so if anyone finds a fix that would be great!

Nick