SL Viewer very unstable

Hello,
I'm using a Intel Mac Mini (model of Sept. 2006) with 1G Ram since I am in SecondLife. My experience is, that the Viewer is allways crashing every few hours. Mostly with a crash-report-window - useles because I'm unable to report anythings specific. Worse of it, if I'm in fullscreen mode (which I have to, cause in window mode graphics are far too slow) sometimes the program is hanging and not possible to log off. I'm often not able to change back to window and have to hardreset my Mac.

I wonder if this behaviour is state-of-art with this peace of Software or is it Mac specific or Mac-Mini specific or specific to my individual Mac ?

Ive had to hard reset SL many times (though Ive had all kinds of crashes like you describe) on my intel iMac. Im now to the point that Im having severe HD problems, and may have to get it replaced. Im not sure if SL caused the problem, or if the drive problems are causing the problems with SL (probably more likely). Take my my advice and run Disk Utility to check your hard drive. Apple unfortunatly is using Maxtor drives in thier computers... I had an external Maxtor drive that had similar crashing problems, and eventually died, so Im not a fan of thiers.

I don't think that it is a erroneous harddisk. Though it is extensively used - I recognized SLViewer is allocating 3-4 GB of virtual memory (!). The disk starts extensive swapping, if I switch to another programm and when I change the screenmode too.

If the disk would lead to an error other programs are likely to crash too. But I can see only SLViewer crashing.

What kind of Intel do you have, Mandi? Core Solo/Duo, Core Duo 2 ?
And which Graphics-Chip?

Yep. I've got a Mini, also.

I *USED* to use the full screen mode 'cuz it was faster, but a version or two ago, it started crashing HARD, just as you describe, Bert.
My solution is to go back to running in a window, and lower the screen resolution.

ALSO, check out the PREVIEW viewer...it seems a lot quicker...the FPS counter says otherwise, but it FEELS quicker.

As for Disk Errors--its fear of the mess they create that made me just give up on the hard resets required from running in FULL SCREEN mode. To fix errors, I run APPLEJACK occasionally. Its free, and fast. And fixes far more than the DISK UTIL.app.

Make sure to switch on VBO in the graphics options to really see the difference

Fullscreen has never truly worked on Mac, I used to use it in 1.6 or 1.7, and it always crashed then, besides, you can't alt-tab in fullscreen to see e-mails or IMs or whatever.

I've noticed that my SLviewer tends to crash whenever I keep it minimized.
I've a macbookpro 2GB.

Dunno Macs but on my Windows box, the highest I've ever seen it go is about 1.5GB. Usually it's under 1GB. The First Look viewer seems to hover around 750MB.

3-4GB sounds very, very high. Unless other Mac users say that they see similar numbers, you might want to look through your settings for things to tone down..

okay. so this thread got me curious, and so I went back to try out the Full Screen mode again. What I came up with is a simple rule that makes it work for me:
DO NOT CHANGE RESOLUTIONS.
As in, if you start in Window Mode at 800x600 resolution (or whatever) make sure that your full screen mode is set to the SAME setting. and DON'T try to change it.
If you try to change the resolution, the Mac seems to absolutely positively freeze harder than a Canadian lake in January.

And NO, this is NOT the way it used to work....

I've seen really simple Mac programs eat up a lot of space in virtual memory, I think it's usually to do with the disk-size, if you have tons of free hard-drive memory then OS X will leave cleaning up till later, usually when you close the program unless there's a reason to do it sooner.