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Kalemika Dougall added a comment - 18/Jul/07 02:54 PM
The freeze is accompanied by a gradual dropping of framerate until the crash occurs.
I'd like to add on to this that this seems to actually be a heating issue. The temperature of the machine rises significantly before the lockup and at the time of freeze peaks around 190 degrees. (I've had it go to 220.)
This may be something to contact apple about rather than LL. My experience regarding temperature is consistent with Kalemika's report above. I'll plug in an external USB fan unit and run the MacBook Pro with Second Life whilst the MacBook Pro is placed on the cooling fans to see if this makes a difference. Meanwhile, if anyone knows an appropriate contact point inside Apple to liaise with on this heating issue topic, I'd be grateful for a tip please.
You should call apple support and talk through it with them, everything that gets sent to them gets tracked. Call and ask for Level 2 support.
On an odd side note, in dealing with apple on this issue they've actually offered to replace my machine which leads me to think this is an isolated manufacturing issue. Just had a long conversation with Apple Tech support in Australia. He was courteous and understanding. But the bottom line is that the best they can do is suggest we take the MacBook Pro to the original vendor (NextByte, Clarence Street, Sydney) or some other Mac diagnostic/repair person who may be able to turn it around quicker (usually takes at least 3 weeks to have anything looked at by the vendor's repair centre), and have the usual Authorised Apple Repairer diagnostics run on the machine to work out what is causing the freeze. Only after that diagnostic is run and a result achieved, will Apple be able to say what the next step should be. There was no offer of a replacement machine, even after the technician and I looked at this thread to gether. I asked if booting into Windows via Bootcamp might make a diffference but the technician surmised likely not - as the same Apple video card drivers would be used by Bootcamp. The idea seems to be that the MacBook Pro hardware is telling the software that the machine is too hot, and OSX is going into "freeze" mode with a spinning ball as a result. This is the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether you might have been better off buying a sad, lacklustre Dell which, for all its lack of glamour, might have performed without such a mysterious problem...
I've had the same problem on the same hardware. I don't think it's a heating issue. My take is that it's a driver bug for the new nVidia hardware, combined with some things that the SL client does that may be stressing the driver. So I'm going to report it here, and as a bug with Apple.
I've had the total freeze happen, but that also happened occasionally on my old MBP with the ATI video card. When the freeze happened, the System CPU time in my menubar CPU meter was rising. I've seen it happen that a SL slowdown to 3fps is accompanied by a rise in System CPU time. When I've thrown Shark at the client, I find that it's spending over 80% of its time in the video driver. When my framerate recovers, SL goes back to spending most of its time in user space. This happened both on the ATI-based MBP and the current one. I tried to force a heat problem by loading the CPU (compiling the Second Life open source client while running Second Life), but when I did that, it didn't crash. I watched the various temperatures in Hardware Monitor. The CPU core temp peaked close to 83C, but then the fans came on and the temp promptly dropped to 78C. I've also had Second Life hang up without crashing the computer, sometimes taking out the GPU such that the WindowServer displays windows erratically until reboot. This has been accompanied by the following in the system.log file: Jul 25 07:42:23 Xoots kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error That symptom hasn't happened since I upgraded to 10.4.10, even though that upgrade didn't change my graphic drivers versions. I'll keep an eye out for it. I'm a programmer, so I'm willing to try out a number of things or gather data. It'd be really neat to see Second Life run more efficiently on the Mac; I think the machine is capable of more. I just started up SL to get the information from it to paste here, and when I switched back to Firefox, the machine hung up for a bit (mouse still moved). I managed to pull up the console to see what had happened, and there were more of the NVChannel errors. Then it froze, and I had to reboot.
So the 10.4.10 upgrade didn't help. Also reported to Apple as Radar 5359677.
It may be worth noting that even with a USB fan thermal cooling unit placed under the MacBook Pro while the MacBook Pro is running Second Life, the left hinge between the MacBook Pro and its screen is so hot it almost burns to touch it....
I've experienced this issue also. The only thing I can add to this thread is the observation that it occurs (on my machine) in both 10.4.9 and 10.4.10.
Hi guys!
I desperately need as much help as I can get, as I need to act pretty quickly in case I need to get my new macbook pro replaced. Here's my story. I purchased my macbook pro (2.4ghz, 256 Nvidia 8800, 160 hard drive) on July 19, 2007. Everything was running smoothly until I started playing Second Life on it. I noticed that after playing Second Life for about 10 or 15 minutes the fans on my macbook pro would to start running quite loudly. Once the fans started everything slowed down and eventually froze. I have called apple and they told me to remove the battery and restart the computer while pressing the apple key, CTRL and P+R. That was done... and it seemed to be a bit better but then it crashed again. I have since installed the smc-fan application and have it runing at 3600. Any other ideas? I mean... do I really have to get a new macbook pro even though everything else is running ok? Any help would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks Angel Hi Angel,
I'm desperate too - and have exactly the same configuration of MacBook Pro as you do. And same problem. What is the smc-fan application you are using and where can it be downloaded please? I'd like to give it a try. Zapping the PRAM is an unexpected recommendation from Apple but can I verify you found it to be an ineffective solution? Kind regards, JJason Here are my crash logs detailing the issue... hope this helps to sort this problem out once and for all!!
Hi Jjason... In a way I am glad to see that I am not the only one experiencing this problem... the smc_fan application is a good tool to have... but it has not helped me with the SL issue... and no... neither did Apple's PRAM zapping... LOL...
I guess my big question to those reading this is: Should I be asking to get my new macbook replaced/repaired/looked at? or is this an issue that LindenLab will eventually resolve? Cheers Angel here's the fan's link: It's normal for the fans to run when the CPU is loaded, and granted, Second Life tends to use a lot of CPU/GPU before the freeze. I use my machine all the time for software development, and run for long periods of time at 100% CPU on both CPUs, and the fans spinning away.
The 83C core temperatures i was seeing are still not way out of line for mobile processors. Also, the MBP dumps all of its hot air out through a vent that runs along the hinge, so when running intense operations, it's normal for the area to get hot. 50C is not dangerous to components, but is very hot to the touch. Anyway, I'm attaching a sample I took of the Second Life client during a time when the GUI froze up, that I also sent to Apple. I'm also attaching a Shark dump taken while Second Life was doing its thing where it drops to 3fps and uses lots of system CPU. You can see it's bogged down in the video driver. Shark data capture of Second Life when it drops to 3fps and runs mostly in system CPU time. You can see it gets bogged down in the video driver; the question is, what is it doing?
Sample of Second Life while GUI is frozen up. Didn't result in a crash this time, but this usually is what happens before a crash.
Another sample from when SL was locking up the GUI.
We believe this is part of the problems described in
Thank you Orson for your detailed analysis! This seems to be caused by a memory leak in IOKit, Apple's manager for device drivers. I opened a radar bug as well. If you profile the memory usage with the terminal command "vmmap" you will see the IOKit section rise as you move around in-world. You will not see this on other mac models. It seems when this value gets too high, the machine crashes.
The current workaround is to just relog. I have this laptop and that really sucks if you have something to do in-world (hey everyone, i gotta relog, don't do anything important! kthxbye!), but this does not appear to be something we can fix on our side. I'll keep investigating, but for now For everyone concerned about temperature / pram / etc that all seems to be a side effect of this issue, and is not the main issue. If this is in fact a driver issue, the problem should go away with an updated driver from Apple. I apologize for the uncertain language I've used here, unfortunately I don't have the ability to debug code points inside Mac OS X itself, just Second Life Hi guys:
I have been discussing this issue with some very smart mac users on the following www.macrumors.com forum... I will attach the link here... one of the most experienced users has looked at my crash log and says that this issue has definitely something to do with anti-aliasing... he encouraged me to disable anti-aliasing in SL but I'm not sure how to do that... here's the link http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=3965756#post3965756 here's what he actually wrote... "Quote: here's my most recent log (as an attachment)... I do see something quite similar to the one Sbrocket pointed out... now I'm scared... as of the anti-aliasing... I am not quite sure how I would go about disabling it... Thanks for your continuing support... it means a lot... *********** Yep, that's your problem! It looks like you got the error and then rebooted 10 minutes later, which I would assume is from waiting to see if the freeze would unstick itself, giving up, doing a hard shutdown, and rebooting. Since I've never played Second Life, I'm not exactly sure how to turn anti-aliasing off...but that's what you need to do. I'm not even sure if you can. That's your problem though. If SL doesn't offer you a way to turn it off, you may have to wait for their developers to add that option or for Apple to fix the graphics drivers. As I mentioned, there's already a few bug reports filed on this. Rocko, that advice is incorrect. Our software does no antialiasing. You can check for this yourself in the open source client and grepping for SMOOTH_HINT, which would find GL_POLYGON_SMOOTH_HINT, for instance. You will find 6 hits, 3 in the windows GL system header, and 3 in the linux GL header. 0 will be inside our source.
We do support OS-level antialiasing in operating systems that let you do that, but I don't know any way to do that on a mac. I actually had SL cause a kernel panic on my machine. It hard-locked for about two minutes, then I got a message in four languages instructing me to cold reboot my computer. It seemed unrelated to heat as the machine was running quite cool at the time.
The console says this: Jul 28 17:24:50 Cassie kernel[0]: 0000000c This freeze problem is now happening reliably a short time after logging in via the Second Life client to the point where the SL client is basically untenable on the MacBook Pro for any serious purposes. It deeply grieves me to write this....
So glad to find out that it's not just me being a klutz about this!
I'm getting exactly the same symptoms as above on a brand new Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. Apple engineers had the laptop, ran a series of diagnostics, and could find nothing wrong. I also tried a clean install to no avail. I should add that, when I first got the laptop, SL ran fine, suggesting to me that it's either the the OSX 10.4.10 update, or one of the recent Second Life updates that triggered the problem. And yes, the laptop does run really hot, and the fan runs like crazy, but I don't think that's unusual for a MacBook Pro. Any help gratefully appreciated. I'm not sure if this is related (as this thread goes back to 1.18.0) but someone just told me that building my viewer on a mac he found that In regard to that last comment, the user just mailed me and told me he got the hang despite reverting the change, but it took longer to happen, so this patch may be related or it may be false alert.. I think I have consistently found that switching on local lights leads to a crash (hard - reboot most of the time) within 2-5 minutes on a MBP 2.4 Ghz/2 gig memory.
If others can verify the same, this is where you should take a closer look at the code. The problems started when I installed MacBook Pro Software Update 1, where there were modifications to a number of the nvida files. I too am having very dissappointing result with a SR MBP 2.4/2GB RAM/256MBVRAM/ Mac OSX 10.4.10. I used a 2.33 for the last six months and SL never had these kinds of problems, although that machine was plagued with 3rd party router incompatiblity issues which were evntually resolved recently with an Airport Update.
Graphical artifacts include a pink haze covering random textures, but when I zoom in and look closer at the prim the pinkness fades and reveals the texture. Another strange anomaly is the appearance of large blocky particle clouds around almost everthing that moves! everything I touch generates clouds of of these screen filling particles! I don't see the normal particles that spin around objects and avatars, only these annoying clouds. I'll get some screenshots up soon. I'm using smcFan at 4200RPMs, I clean my system regularly with Onyx and clear SL cache every few weeks. To no avail. I am also experiencing the nearly predictable freezing and heat issues as described in great detail by other posters. I set up a Macbook Pro for a professor at work on Monday, a brand new Santa Rosa with 2GB of RAM, 2.3GHz, 256MB VRAM.... and of course I had to see how SL ran on it.
Expecting awesome performance, I was disappointed when it ran about as fast as, then slower than my 1.5 year old x1600 based Macbook Pro Core Duo. In my experience, ATI has much better Mac OS X drivers than Nvidia. Which is sad because the opposite is true under Windows and Linux! I'm not sure who dropped the ball here. My Mac Pro had an Nvidia 7300GT in it when I got it, and I was plagued with problems. FPS slowdowns, glitches, crashes, and crappy overall performance far below what a 7300GT should get. When I upgraded to the Radeon X1900XT, the problems vanished. It was like having a new computer. Everything was fast, smooth, zero glitching, and so on. I eventually had a problem with that card because the rev 1 x1900xt's had a heatsink problem and would slowly cook themselves to death, but my rev 2 replacement has been trouble-free since I got it. So, apparently... with Macs, ATI is the way to go. Which is sad because their only laptops with real GPUs right now are Nvidia based. Also another comment.. out of curiosity a couple of months ago I put my 7300GT back into the Mac Pro to try it out and see if they had fixed the problems, and they had. It was slower than the X1900XT of course, but very playable and there was no more glitching or crashing.
So we do have hope the problems will be fixed! I doubt Apple will let these bugs linger. And then there's always leopard.... I just hope this doesn't take much longer... it's already been about a month since I bought my new MBP SR and everytime I try to use SL it freezes and crashes... OMG... I can't live without SL for this long. I have to keep borrowing my roommate's computer... soon I'll be selling my new MBP and getting a PC... yuck!! ... I can't believe I just said that... LOL
Does the new Apple MacBook Pro firmware update 1.1 fix this problem? Anyone found the freeze problem persists even after the software update is installed? Kind regards, Jjason
The Software Update 1.1 hasn't resolved the freeze for me.
I have a 17" Santa Rosa MacBook Pro, and I've also been experiencing said evil nasty lockup issues. As far as I can tell, they're not heat related – I have smcfancontrol running my fans at full bore when SL is running, and telling me the temperature is around 65°C. I find that running the pre-voice (1.18.0.6) client, I get a lot fewer lockups. With voice, I get lockups around every five minutes, but with the pre-voice client, it varies a lot more – I can go for up to 6-7 hours without an issue, and most of the time when it crashes, it doesn't take the rest of my system with it.
With the voice client, more often than not, I wouldn't even get beachball. My clock would stop, the mouse would stop responding, and that was that. No kernel panic, just system halt. A couple of times, it crashed to desktop and I was able to grab screenies of what it wound up looking like after said crash. I'll post some momentarialy. As for everything else, I'll keep my eye on Activity Monitor, and check through my logs after every crash and report back. Cheers! CCC I have found that by reinstalling my OS (using Archive & Install) and NOT installing MacBook Pro Software Update 1 these system hangs requiring a hard power cycle have been reduced to a moderately annoying 5-10 second SL freeze that recovers on it's own and does not affect other apps.
This is on a 15" 2.4GHz SR MBP with 4GB of RAM. I can confirm that that was my experience prior to the 1.0 update as well. Performance was pretty poor, but the complete system hangs did not occur and the problem (if it is the same problem) only manifested as temporary freezing.
I just wanted to let you guys know that ever since the Macbook Pro update came out and that I have turned off the "display local lights" setting my SL client no longer freezes like it used to. I am not sure if this has fixed the issue completely or if it's just an improvement.
I have been trying different things in order to try to keep the viewer running as long as possible without having to relog and I think I found one way to extend the usability period until you have to logout or crash. Basically, when I see the VM approaching the 2GB mark (I have 3GB RAM), I switch to full screen using Option-Enter, then back to window mode. I've seen the viewer going from over 2GB of VM down to 1.5GB just by the switch. However, that trick seems to work once or twice if you're lucky. At some point, the laptop freezes. In any case, the driver seems to be the problem based on previous useful analysis but it seems that the viewer is somewhat related too. Or else, how explaining that around 500MB of VM are released just by switching resolution?
I have been experiencing this issue since the last update 1.18.2 .I can confirm that it is not heat related. I am running smcFanControl and I can see that my temps stay below 120 and I crash. I also have 4Gb of RAM and the viewer will crash regardless of how much physical or virtual memory is being used.
Is there any progress on this issue, either from SL or from Apple? It's been over a month now that I am basically confined to our sky home - going out into areas with several visitors or more prims will inevitably cause a crash, sometimes within a minute of arriving there. Zooming around with the camera often causes these crashes. And each time, the MacBook locks solid - no response anymore to keyboard or mouse, and my only recourse is to keep the power-button pressed until the machine switches off hard. This is with local lighting disabled and with the MacBookPro update installed. SL has become completely unplayable for me, and it's only for the friends I've made here that I still visit. Can't build, can't explore, can't shop. What can we do to give this issue more priority within SL and/or within Apple?
(MBP C2d 2.2GHz 2GB). Same question as Duncan - any progress or updates or things we can do to get this resolved? I'll bug anyone anywhere to try and get this resolved. I had the older MBP with the ATi card - few problems and rare complete freeze-ups / system crashes. New MBP with nvidia card - system crash, system crash, system crash. Right now I'm using Bootcamp to run Vista - no problems - not one system crash - even running multiple clients - though drivers won't let me use my external widescreen at anything greater than 1024 x 768.
A Mac with this hardware should not constantly crash just playing SL, nor should it run better with Windows as the OS. Please help!!! Old system (MBP 2.166 Core 2 Duo, 2GB ram, ATI x1900) I have called Apple Tech Support regarding this issue, and they claim that it is related purely to Second Life not being written properly for the drivers of the NVIDIA 8600M GT. I don't know if the tech with whom I spoke was truly knowledgable on the issue however; he sounded like he was just speculating.
In any case there is a Mac OS X 10.4.11 update pending (should be out soon; has already been seeded to developers). Can anyone out there confirm whether 10.4.11 will fix this issue, or whether there is any SL update pending that would fix it? Are we going to have to wait until Leopard (10.5) comes out in October sometime? I upgraded from PowerBook G4 soley to get better SL & music recording performance; music recording performance is more than double, but SL performs worse. This issue has been known for quite some time now... I do not mean to sound impatient but this is an extremely frustrating issue. I feel we should not be left in the dark for this long about it. Poppy Linden claims it's Apple's bug, Apple tells me it's SL's bug. Who is right? Has Apple acknowledged this bug to SL? Does it occur in any other games? Is there any word on a fix? I have been running SL in Vista but it was not a "legal" copy and now it's locked up again. Also I did get "blue screen of death" type crashes several times in Vista, as well. We should not be forced to have to spend hundreds of dollars on another O.S. Please any updates on whether this issue is close to being resolved would be MOST appreciated. Thank you! Gistya MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA 8600M GT Poppy Linden or Torley Linden,
It has been a month since either of you posted on this issue, PLEASE post with some comment , has Apple responded to you on the radar report you filed? Have you identified this an a SL programing problem or an Apple IOKIT issue or a GeForce driver problem yet? My machine crashes (or the activity monitor indicates that I need to log out/in again) every five minutes, that's 20 crashes an hour, I can't build anything or do any business that way. Latest update: (copied from VWR-1978 - Meta-issue: 2007 MacBook Pro (nVidia 8600M GT) issues)
Hi everyone, I have been in contact with Apple regarding this issue. This is what we know:
I am sorry for the lack of updates. I'm not convinced this is anything more than a summary of what we knew before, but I'm hearing that's better than silence. Another workaround (aside from relogging) is to toggle fullscreen modes. This deletes and re-creates your GL context. Thanks to Runitai Linden for that insight, and other debugging help. It's not so much the content of the update as it is just a reminder that you guys are working on it.
On a thing like SL it's easy to imagine that problems get forgotten about. We're all unable to seriously use SL, we just don't want to feel forgotten about. :I OK, I e-mailed Steve Jobs about this issue, and posted about it in the MacNN forums:
http://forums.macnn.com/69/macbook-pro-and-powerbook/346958/vista-runs-faster-more-stable-macbook/#post3471019 
Hopefully something gets done. First, I notice the reporter is running Adium. I am too, and I've seen that when I get a message in Adium is when I crash. At first I thought it was just Adium, but as you'll see below, it's any app that happens to overlap Second Life and uses an alpha (every app – think window shadow.)
I'm also on a new new MacBook Pro with the NVidia 8600m GT video card...
So my hunch is this is an OpenGL problem. Running in Full-screen will most likely protect you from evil overlapping applications. The other option is to run with nothing else running, or make absolutely certain no other app will overlap the viewer window. I have been experiencing this problem as well (MBP, 2.4GHz C2D Santa Rosa, 4 GB Ram, Nvidia 8600M GT)... even running without any other apps (and no overlapping windows) I had a SL crash – with garbled video – in just a few minutes of operation. Hoping (in vain?) for a fix before 10.5... Just thought I would add my $0.02 and note that this happened without an overlapping window.
Lan I'm sad sad sad to report that I just installed the latest beta seed of 10.5, and this problem is NOT solved by 10.5............ NOT solved. It crashes even faster. Same memory leak issue (watched it happen in activity monitor).
Though interestingly enough, Second Life utilizes both processor cores in 10.5, and seemed to have very high frame rates for the, oh, 2 minutes it ran before it crashed. So that, at least, is encouraging. I hope this is fixed before October 18th, I am co-presenting on the topic "Virtual Worlds: Innovative Platforms for Business and Learning." It would be sad to report that you cannot use SL on some Mac platforms.
I just joined Second Life within the last month. Using a one year old MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM & ATI Radion X1600, VRAM 128 MB...
I crash ALL the time. I am a live musician and it is getting to be embarassing, my "live stream" of music continues flawlessly using NiceCast, but the Second Life UI is a joke for me. I feel I have a pretty good laptop, even for a year old. Is this the norm in SL that I will have to look forward to? Capo Freenote i too am part of the community experiencing this frustrating freeze problem on the macbook pro. here is the advice i received in response to a SL ticket i filed on this: " Please assign the Second Life process to a single core as this may be causing the issue and let me know if this has any effect."
can anyone provide instruction as to how "assing SL process to a single core" ? also, has anyone tried this fix approach? thanks... I'm afraid the anti-alias/overlapping windows fix was just casual; I've been testing the SL viewer and it all seems really random: I got crashes while running SL alone and I had no problems when I opened all sorts of windows on it - and viceversa, of course
 Apple keeps saying (verbally - my laptop is still in warranty and i get phone support) that this is a SL viewer problem. LL have been helpful but very vague: "It might be a viewer problem, or apple's or open GL".
I might try the single core fix, if someone posts instructions for that. But hey, that is ridiculous: maybe turning off the monitor would help as well, but.... As commented in VWR-1978...
Hi everyone, There is a new workaround for this issue. Scot Linden discovered that you can use a different driver for this video card and the computer should not crash. He wrote up instructions on the Second Life wiki. Apple has not committed to a date for a fix, but this workaround should help. Hope it works as well for you as it does for me! https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/MacBook_Pro_2007_Graphics_Freeze_Workaround + poppy I noticed something interesting:
The standalone reproduction requires turning on RenderGlow, which results in an instant crash. Running under profiler, turning on RenderGlow results in zero difference in image. That suggests to me that whatever feature allows bloom is not enabled in the profile. Maybe that helps? <3 I'm just going to note that I experience this issue as well on a 1st-gen MacBook Pro (ATi Radeon X1600). While playing SL, and with no reproducible steps, the entire machine will freeze (though the mouse cursor will still move). I've noticed, however, that it is apparently just the window server that is frozen. I can SSH into the machine during these "freezes", and perform operations as usual. Killing processes, however, results in zombies that don't actually die. A shutdown and/or reboot can be performed.
Suzy, this is the EXACT same problem that I have. I don't have a repro case either... it seems random to me. It doesn't matter if I have other apps running, but this crash almost always eventually happens to me.
All graphics freeze except for the mouse pointer, but the other processes on the machine continues to operate normally until I force a reboot. I also have a 1st gen MBP with Radeon X1600 and 1.5GB RAM. Hi: Is anyone working to fix this issue, deemed critical in july and still pending? The workaround works, but the quality of the graphics is much inferior, and it's still not reccomended. Support suggested I install the latest viewer ("it might help resolve your issue", which i did: it doesn't work exactly like before. Can we please hear from someone? Ty
Apple released today a graphic fix for MBPs 2.2 and 2.4 Ghz. It seems to do the trick, although the SL viewer load still seems to be only on one CPU. But that is definetly not an Apple issue. Thanks to LL for the prompt alert.
Beautiful that it works under Tiger.
...Now what about Leopard? Still broken with the MacBook Pro Software Update 1.2.
Doesn't freeze the machine, but SL freezes out and eventually crashes, and there is spillage of SL textures into other programs. Just to survive with a decent framerate, I have to tell SL that my card only has 128MB, but it still freezes SL. Slightly different log information:
Nov 3 11:10:50 Xoots kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x6 = Fifo: Parse Error Funny crash dump: ********** Host Name: Xoots Command: Second Life Version: Second Life version 1.18.4.2 (1.18.4.2) PID: 500 Link (dyld) error: no suitable image found. Did find: Since I can't amend the previous one, new Apple bug 5578350
Orson, as a potential data point for you, I can add that I've seen the machine freeze still after the upgrade. Granted that this was after we switched to full-screen mode and I didn't try logging in externally, but the thing certainly looked quite frozen.
Hello this is the 1st time I write here, and sorry for my poor english. I'm really desperated. I have a Mac Pro 2 x 2.66GHz 4GB RAM with a Radeon X1900XT video card and Leopard 10.5.1 and a brand new system folder. Almost once a week, in past with Tiger, my cinema display turned off when SL was running. Now with Leopard is even worse. I have 2 problems, they happens in casual mode. Either the display turns off, or the screen freezes up and I have to turn off the mac with the power button. I noticed I crash more often if I'm listening streaming videos or music. I'm running the viewer 1.18.4.3, I tried to use the Release Candidate 1.18.5.1, Windlight 1.18.5.74061 and the new OnRez client, without any better result. The only way to stay more without any crash is to keep a smaller window in the viewer (800 x 600). You just can imagine how I can edit objects in a small window like this. I crash more times a hour and I think my Mac Pro is getting broken very soon with this treatment. I always send a crash report an I hope Linden's and Apple may resolve these problem very soon.
Plus, I have a MacBook Pro (September '07) and SL is hanging up just after 5 minutes  Thanks all for any help. I'm reassigning the MacBook Pro NVidia tasks. I have been focused on simulator development and really not doing any viewer / graphics work. Fortunately I had a talk recently with BigPapi and he casually mentioned working with vendors for graphics issues in windlight. We talked about it, and he feels confident he can name sets of calls that are problems on certain sets of hardware, and that's what needs to happen.
There is a report in the Apple forums that this problem can be worked-around by turning off object-object occlusion in the settings.xml file. There seems to be memory leak due to a bad graphics driver on some of the MacBooks related to this function. I have not been able to try that yet because, being a new Mac owner, I cannot figure out why I don't seem to have a "settings.xml" file. My installation of SecondLife is different for some reason. There is no record of SecondLife in the Library/Application Data/ directory?
If anyone can give me an idea why that file is not on my machine, it would be greatly appreciated I am running 10.5.1 on a 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a 200GB 7200RPM hard drive. The GPU is NVIDIA 8600M GT.
I took a break from SL for a long time because I got so tired of all the crashes. I heard that they had fixed these issues so I decided to try it again. The issues persist. If I'm running the Mac client, it goes for a few minutes just fine but periodically it will completely lock up the computer for about 30-120 seconds. There will either be a spinning beach ball, or there will be very erratic cursor movement with the cursor flying all over the screen around the edges anytime I try to move the cursor. If I wait then it will snap back out of this freeze and start working again. But sometimes it never snaps back out and I have to physically power the computer off. I do a lot of high-CPU-intensive tasks like audio recording with drum machines and virtual instruments, Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, etc. and this computer NEVER crashes during any of those tasks. Second Life is the ONLY thing that crashes this computer. It's really starting to f****ing tick me off because I bought this computer specifically to run Second Life, back in June of this year. And for the last 6 months, all it does is freeze and crash whenever I run Second Life, whether in Mac OS X or Vista. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY IN SIX MONTHS THE SECOND LIFE DEVELOPER CANNOT FIX THIS PROBLEM. I have spent over $200USD on Second Life during this time (which is nothing compared to what some people spend, I realize), and nearly $3000 on computer hardware for Second Life, and I find it completely unacceptable that paying customers like myself get absolutely no support or any sort of action to resolve these issues which essentially TOTALLY CRIPPLE the Second Life software!!! At this point the only natural thing to me seems to start a bad press campaign against Second Life and Linden Labs for failing to address the crashing issues in this ridiculously long amount of time. People should be aware that they should not use Second Life since it's highly likely that Linden Labs will not bother to address any bugs that cause debilitating crashes, while meanwhile Linden Labs spends inordinate amounts of developer resources developing useless and unwanted features like Voice Chat and other crapola that nobody asked for or uses. I upgraded to Leopard specifically in the hope that it would fix the Second Life crashing issues, but it did not fix them. They just changed slightly. So what am I supposed to do? HOW DO I GET SECOND LIFE TO WORK WITHOUT FREEZING AND CRASHING MY WHOLE COMPUTER??
SimpleMan:
The folder is in the Username Library, not at drive root level. ie the one with the Home picture, your user login name: UserName > Library > Application Support > SecondLife > user_settings and you'll see settings.xml If you still can't find it, search for a folder with SecondLife (no space between Second and Life). It may not work on MacBook Pro, but it seems to work with the new MacBooks, and that's turning off Occulsions. You can access it in gaame from the Client/Server menus if you can be in long enough to do it, or manually by changing the settings.xml file. http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1229582&tstart=0 It would seem it would be a good idea to make this off as a default for all MacBooks... Although there is a simple work around editing the settings.xml file Second Life will still crash after a few minutes... i suspect a huge memory leak. I'm surprised this issue is still going on after so many months and very few updates. Not only does this issue affect MacBook Pro but also MacBook late 2007 models. I have all but left Second Life as I just can't play any more and It looks like Linden Labs isn't interested in a fix anytime soon. I'm very active on the Apple boards since 2001 and I know a lot of people that are hanging up their avatars as a result... so sad!
BigPapi, you commented elsewhere (http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1757?focusedCommentId=42860#action_42860
) that this problem is in Apple's hands. Since Apple's release cycle for system updates can be rather long, does it make sense for Linden Lab to come up with a straightforward workaround in the meantime? This may be promising... Apple have apparently split off the "graphics driver" update coming in Leopard 10.5.2 into its own package, which is probably a good indication that they've actually put a lot of work into fixing problems specifically like this one. It'd be great if anyone has developer access to test the latest pre-release build and see. Here's hoping, anyway.
(referring to: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/01/23/apple_implements_20_new_fixes_in_latest_mac_os_x_10_5_2_build.html FWIW, my Mac Pro has started exhibiting this behavior. I'm running 10.4.11 and have a Radeon X1900. Over the past few weeks, I can't sustain Second Life for longer than about 10 minutes before a camera move or some such action causes my Mac to hang. Sometimes the displays freeze in place, sometimes they suddenly go black. I've noticed when they go black that the sound is still streaming from Second Life, so I'm taking it for a graphics hang rather than a system freeze. It's freezing with various old and new and pre-release versions of Second Life, and it's pretty effective at keeping me away from this world anymore.
The hard OS X freezing is back with RC 1.19.1(4).
I am also getting intermittent freezes for a few seconds every few minutes in the last few RC releases - everything stops (the OS works) and then resumes. — You are at 207710.7, 293759.3, 25.9 in MMC located at sim3119.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.20.108:13005) CPU: Dual i386 (Unknown) (2200 MHz) Clarification: does not happen every time (worked for 4 hours now), but it did happen twice in the last few days.
The periodic 5-10 sec freeze every few mins is constant though. Like others recently, I am seeing this problem – or one like it – on my MacPro, not a MacBOOK Pro. On the "mid" graphics automatic setting, it crashes the computer, requiring manual power cycle, within 5 minutes. The former official viewer, I could run for hours at very high graphics settings. Have voted/commented on similar JIRAs that have not been assigned yet.
Model Name: Mac Pro Someone mentioned their theory that this is a heat issue for the Macbook Pro but that is wrong, i run mine on a cooling pad and it rarely exceeds skin temperature but crashes and freezes exactly as described by others.
System: Macbook Pro, 15" 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM GeForce 8600M GT And, BTW - in Leopard, with WL (now official viewer), I get 8 fps on medium graphics settings. If I boot to Windows and connect to the same sim 2 minutes later, I get 20 fps on ultra.
Disappointing, to say the least.. For a total freeze about 30 seconds into sl..this worked on my NEW Macbook...(not the problem with old ones) Find the "user_settings" folder under your Second Life folder that is under yourname/library/Application support/secondLife/user_settings Data. Note also you will have a folder with your Avatar's name. Don't change the settings.xml file in that folder - change the one in the user_settings folder.
same thing happening to me. i was under the impression that the leopard update was supposed to fix the graphics issue with the mbp and geforce 8600, but i guess that wasn't the case. it's true that we don't get the hard crashes anymore, but the freezing and pinwheeling is still extremely constant. completely unacceptable. i'm not sure if this is a result of windlight, or the newest viewers, but it really should not be happening. i was able to run second life smoothly with much older hardware. i am now running 4 gigs of RAM on a 2.4ghz core 2 duo with the 8600. I should be able to run smoothly with the graphics settings on high, but instead i can't even function with the settings turned all the way down.
I've only got a slight variation on these log messages, but I'll post mine anyway, in the hopes that it helps:
NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error PM notification timeout (pid 10739, loginwindow) This seemed to happen a bit with RC5, but increased dramatically with RC6. . . until I turned antialiasing off, at which point, I haven't seen it crash yet, but I haven't run it for as long as I should before I say things like that, either. I will also note that, for folks that're handy with ssh, this doesn't completely lock up my system: I can log in, wander through log files, sudo dmesg, all that good stuff (the above is from dmesg, hence the lack of datestamps). I can even kill some things – emphasis on "some". Trying to kill WindowServer doesn't help, killing Second Life gets ignored, and killing it with -9 does cause a nice, hard lockup, or at the very least, takes network connectivity with it. Oh, yeah, and while this is going on, the magic restart keystroke that I only recently discovered, Ctrl-Command-Eject, also doesn't work when it locks up, but ssh'ing in and issuing a sudo reboot does. Usually. This is an 8-core Mac Pro (2.8 mHz), 4G RAM, 512M VRAM (set to 256M texture memory), running 1.20RC[5-6], with a 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator PE (I mention this because flycam seems to aggravate things a wee bit). Video card is an NVIdia 8800 GT, and if anybody needs any more gory details, I'll be happy to supply 'em. Oh, yeah. This is OS 10.5.2. This problem is becoming a widely-known joke. http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2008/05/sl-and-pos-lapt.html Performance problems on MacBook Pros are back with a vengeance and there is currently no functional viewer available for use on this machine.
Performance deteriorated again markedly about a week ago (June 21) and have now (since the deploy of the new server version?) gotten so bad that SL is unusable on my machine. For example, I've now spent 20 minutes trying to aim for a door so I can walk through it. Clothes take ages to come on or off. Map and pics load very slowly if at all. Objects rez very slowly if at all. Both avatar and camera movement are very very jerky. I've pulled all handles in the graphics setting panel as far left as they will go thinking that an ugly world is better than no world at all, but that didn't help either. The people at support hate me by now i think lol and have told me to not come back there with this issue and to come here with it instead. From what I read here I haven't got any big hopes of a fix, but one has to keep trying I guess... I'm using a a MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 0.5.3. 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 4MB L2 cache, bus speed 800 MHz, 256 MB VRAM. ADSL modem 24 Mbit/sec ; computer-modem connection via ethernet. Nothing exceptional about connection speed or packet loss. I've tried both the RC and the regular client and none of them work so at the moment I have no possibility of doing anything meaningful in SL. All the symptoms are the same as in previous reports the about severe lag using the MacBook Pro. Hence it would appear that perhaps a solution similar to that applied to earlier server versions might at least partially remedy this problem also this time. Is anyone checking up on this? I can confirm that also for me disabling Object Occlusion as suggested by ulver voight - 13/Apr/08 04:02 AM above does to some extent alleviate the performance problems. What appears to be going on is that clogging of whatever it is that gets clogged takes significantly longer with Object Occlusion disabled than when it is on, making it possible to get out up to about 30 minutes of useful time in between relogs. Instead of editing the settings.xml file as suggested by ulver another option is to set UseOcclusionValue in the Advanced menu --> Debug settings to FALSE.
Seems to me this is something the Lindens ought to know about; might help point at what the problem is and would be a very useful tip to get from the help desk... I am definitely seeing some improvement from disabling Object Occlusion. I am also running this under Open GL Profiler with a replacement driver (I'm forgetting which at the moment). It is certainly not eliminating crashes or fatal slowing of graphics but it seems to make it less frequent. I stayed alive for almost two hours tonight while hopping between and running around graphic element rich environments. Let's see how it holds up.
Using Open GL Profiler is not an option to me, because it disables all advanced graphics settings, so its really no fun to look at ...
I wish a sl viewer for Mac, capable running at 512 m distance setting, and all Graphics set to maximum, as the windows sl viewers are operating for years now ... LL, pls put some nice real Mac Cocoa programmers on this ? Please ? Wish I was capable of adding the kind of detailed information, suggestions and requests that so many users have been contributing for more than a year.
Wish LL was capable of providing a solution or even an information update on this significant problem for a core group of users. Do longstanding issues like these gain in priority over time, or are they viewed as 'vintage' or 'classic' problems that will be addressed by LL Cold Case experts after this group of users is no more? .......Anybody? .......Anybody? ...... Buehler? Rip, please see the main issue
There a number of things you can try On the login screen, before you connect to Second Life please go to Edit > Preferences > Graphics and set it to Low. Please check Custom and turn off Avatar Imposters. Under Hardware Options please set Texture memory no more than half your graphics memory. When you are logged in From the Advanced Menu [Ctl - Alt - D] turn off Rendering > Object-Object occlusion Thank you : ) Changed bug title to reflect that tis issue is centrally about complete machine lockups requiring restart, not the temporary freezes that now occur. I haven't personally seen this issue since the 10.5.2 update, and should probably be closed. The intermittent freezes, however...
This issue was reported as Affects Version/s: 1.18
If it is still an issue for you using the latest RC Viewer 1.22 [and Second Life Server 1.25.5.109327] which can be downloaded from here Release Candidate Test Viewers
For account-specific help please Submit a Ticket with Support Thank you : ) Resolving re JIRA issue posting guidelines |
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Bug
Resolved
Critical
Second Life viewer client permanently freezes on MacBook Pro, requires hard machine restart
