@jackson said:

Two dyslexics walk into a bra.

An old VP of mine tried to convince me that dyslexics have daily sex

@unknownuser said:

Has anyone run across interesting ways to harvest all the extra energy collected over the summer (besides everyone in the family taking really long showers)?

Sure;
a) build a swimming pool
b) heat it with that hot water
c) invite many hot babes round to use pool
d) enjoy

This sort of style is where I can see some real sense in the slightly-odd request someone posted a couple of days ago for a line/face setup that would do a hidden-lines line style but absent faces. That way the notepad texture would show through and it would look like a real pencil sketch.

@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 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.

@petercharles said:

The patent must describe the invention in such details as can be understood by a man "skilled in the art". This will mean anyone can make it from the patent, except that they will be prevented from doing so in the countries that have granted the patent.

Not quite; they would be prevented from making them for profit without permission of the patent holder. Patents do not stop anyone making something patented. They require the maker to have permission from the owner, usually of course granted in exchange for money. Nothing stops someone from getting a patent and allowing cost-free licenses. Or even - so far as I know at the moment - refusing all licenses and thus preventing the thing being made by anyone. Now, if only I could have had a patent on the core of Word, so I could stop it from driving a billion people insane...

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.

If you have a tool (I don't do windows, so I have no idea whether you have) that will watch the memory usage of running programs, see if there is any indication of a memory leak. I've got pretty clear evidence of one on my iMac and it's just possible you're suffering the same problem in windows form

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.

@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.

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.

@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:

1. 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:

2. 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:

3. 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.

@bjanzen said:

1. 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!

It's a Piglet Squid, Helicocranchia pfefferi. See http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/friday_cephalopod_some_pig.php amongst others

@august said:

@tomot said:

... Perhaps the fountain pen solution should have been adapted for the printer.

An elegant idea. The Fisher company spent millions of dollars to develop a pen that would write in zero gravity for NASA. It got a closeup in Kubrick's "2001". The Russians used pencils.

Not quite. Fisher spent about $1m of their own money to develop the pen and patent it. NASA bought about 400, apparently at around $6 each. The Soviet program bought a hundred or so to replace the grease pencils they had (like NASA) previously used. No one would use normal graphite pencils; at least not if they wanted to survive the mission. Care to imagine the electrical problems that might arise from graphite dust floating around a micro-gravity capsule? Dead astronauts are such an embarrassment.

@unknownuser said:

Nice job on the video!

Its possible to embed video in SecondLife walls- there has got to be away...

Croquet ( and Qwaq Forums) manage it easily enough. Word docs, spreadsheets, etc. All within virtual worlds that are totally user programable and network sharable. http://www.opencroquet.org and http://www.qwaq.com

@tim said:

@tricias said:

Tim - does turning off Fast Feedback in Preferences > OpenGL seem to fix your lock up as well?

I'll try it and see.

Sigh. No improvement at all. Exactly the same errors logged, exactly the same lock-up.

@unknownuser said:

I'll try it and see.

@unknownuser said:

Also, we are wondering if you see a pattern in how many document windows you have open at the time of the crash. Or whether it seems to happen only with certain actions - e.g. only when adding geometry, or when selecting things etc...

I very rarely have more than 2 document windows open - so rarely I can't remember doing it. I do tend to have most of the tool windows open (layers, outliner, styles, components etc) most of the time. I can't discern any pattern of actions involved.

My model is not particularly complex
30,000 edges
13,000 faces
622 component instances
2 groups
3 images
235 component definitions
10 layers
47 materials
1 style
everything else 0

Don't worry about asking questions; I'll only get worried when you d

I'll try it and see.

@unknownuser said:

Also, we are wondering if you see a pattern in how many document windows you have open at the time of the crash. Or whether it seems to happen only with certain actions - e.g. only when adding geometry, or when selecting things etc...

I very rarely have more than 2 document windows open - so rarely I can't remember doing it. I do tend to have most of the tool windows open (layers, outliner, styles, components etc) most of the time. I can't discern any pattern of actions involved.

My model is not particularly complex
30,000 edges
13,000 faces
622 component instances
2 groups
3 images
235 component definitions
10 layers
47 materials
1 style
everything else 0

Don't worry about asking questions; I'll only get worried when you don't....

Hi Barry -
no, there is no crash report as such, just the log messages in the windowserver.log and then total UI death. It may be of interest that iTunes keeps on playing, and don't forget that I can log in from one of my other macs and poke around. That might allow some sort of remote debugging experiments? Let me know. My time is my own for a week or so, so I can spend some if it working on this with you if you have tests for me to try.

It might sound callous but I'm glad someone else with different equipment is having similar crashes. At least that offers some more chance of reproducibility. I used to hate intermittent errors when I was managing s/w development...

Oh well, nice idea google-guys. I just had a repeat of the exact same crash as before. Let's see what the next suggestion is like!