Crashes and freezes with 10.5.1

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 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??

-=GE=-

Don't know what to tell you.

I have the same setup as you (2.4GHz MBP), with only 2GB RAM as opposed to your 4GB, and while I get as many crashes as EVERYONE who runs SL (Mac or PC), I've been on Mac since day one and I don't get anywhere near as bad performance as you describe.

I can stay in world for quite some time without a beachball or a system lockup. It does happen, mind you, but I'm often in for hours before it happens, depending on what I'm doing.

How's your internet connection? Are you using AirPort or are you on Ethernet? I found that AirPort gave me much worse performance in SL than having it hard wired to my router.

I think I've heard of people totally removing Second Life from their computer and reinstalling. You may want to remove the "~/Library/Application Support/SecondLife" folder when you do that (in the Library folder in your home directory). I also use the Windlight client, it has seemed to crash a whole lot less than the regular client. Although lately it seems that it locks up when I exit. I usually force-quit it while it says it's logging out.

have a mac mini, SL consistently crashes when i am building, organizing inventory, chatting, in an populated area, and about every 10 minutes. it's a pain.

i have deleted my cache, restarted (when it freezes, it requires a power shutoff to gain control of the mouse). i just downloaded the new release hoping it would be different. it wasn't. 10 minutes, crash.

i have deleted the application support folder from the library, to no effect.

help island hasn't really.

if i hadn't spent so many L$ on this hair, i'd pull it out.

One suggestion. In the preferences settings for SL, where you can indicate how much VRAM your video card has, select the radio button that is one value LESS than what you realy have. For example I have a Mac Pro tower, with the ATI X1900 512 MB VRAM card. I set my VRAM preference to 256, and I can use any of the SL clients under OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard) with no crashes at all, and very good performance.

The problem with a lot of Leopard users seems to be that SL doesn't manage VRAM correctly with the current ATI drivers, and if you set the VRAM value in preferences the same as the card actually has, you crash. There is supposed to be a driver upgrade coming from ATI fairly soon that will specificly fix this. Until them, half your VRAM is the price for no crashes in SL.

Well, I have tried it both ways: setting VRAM usage to 256MB (max) or 128MB (half) and either way, I get the same crappy performance results.

Also the frame-rate seems to be less than what I get when I'm rebooted under Windows Vista. And in Vista, the NVIDIA Control Panel lets me force anti-aliasing to be turned on. I'd just run it in Vista except there I also get crashes (blue screen of death) and also all my creative apps like Photoshop and BBEdit which I use for SL content creation and scripting are on the Mac side.

I will try reinstalling the client and deleting the Application Support folder, though I don't see how this will help anything because I already have deleted everything INSIDE the Application Support folder and reinstalled the client multiple times. But what the hell.

I just think it's ridiculous that you can buy the top-of-the-line system -- a computer that can run Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion at full resolution with no hitches -- and SL gets 5-15 frames per second in most areas (and that's without most of the graphics features turned on... at full settings it's completely unusable).

I really think Linden Labs needs to realize that there are thousands of people who try SL for like, 5 minutes, and then never use it again because it's such a piece of garbage and runs like crap even on advanced hardware configurations. They should really spend some serious time getting the thing to just run smooth and be more user friendly, rather than constantly adding new features. Then maybe it would run good, and the number of SL users would increase.

-=GE=-

I had the same problem, but in my case SL would freeze only a few seconds after I logged in, and it would never unfreeze except for 2-3 seconds at a time.

It seems fixed now (so far, it's only been a little while since I tried the following).

What I did was:
1. Delete the "second life" folder from ~/Library/Application Support/
2. Set the VRAM setting to a lower setting (half of the actual VRAM)
3. Turned off the firewall (on a hunch that SL uses some extra port and isn't being recognized correctly).

And now it works. I've even turned the firewall back on and it continues to work - that's not an indication that the firewall is not to blame, it may just means that whatever SL needed to do is done and the firewall won't block it anymore, or it could be a side-effect of the bug in the leopard firewall that caused things like Skype to stop working (that's been fixed, but the damage could still be there from earlier).

I was having problems with SL crashing upon launch, every time (new computer, Mac Mini). Problem solved my removal of ~/Library/Application Support/SecondLife folder. Glad I read it here.

I would definitely suggest updating to (at least) 10.5.6.. check many other posts in this forum.

since the issue is happening on both vista and osx, I suggest you might try a test to see if the problem is an intermittent network borking problem. Run itunes listening to a radio station. If the music stops when your beach ball is spinning, you know the internet is your problem. I've been having intermittent problems with that, they seem to come and go. But I know for sure its not a SL problem

Hi, I am a pro and an imac macboock, I have many problems of stability and I need to configure the ports in the firewall? I have to do to connect more than 2 minutes? I need help or references, if possible in Spanish.

who resurrected this old thread from 2007? sheesh