SL Crash when Switching Apps

Anyone else notice this?

MBP 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo, Mac OS 10.4.9, 2 GB RAM

When I run SL and switch to another application (Eudora say to read my e-mail) and then an SL IM comes in, SL crashes nearly every time. I can reproduce this easily.

While reading my e-mail, I'll get a dialog box from SL asking for my attention and when I click OK SL goes bye bye. Quite annoying both to me and my friends who are trying to IM me.

I would say your experience is quite common. SL is probably one of the, if not the, most demanding applications you run. And from every standpoint- CPU and RAM and Video card demands. When you launch another app, SL has to give up something, and it will very likely crash as it was already running your Mac at 110%! (at least that is true on my iMac G5 with 1gb ram). I'm not saying I never launch another app with SL running, but I fully expect it to crash when I do.

Crashing is usually caused by memory problem (most often running out of memory space). Your system seem to have enough physical memory (2Gb) to run more than 2 applications simultaneously. (I usually run 5-6 applications at once on my Mac with only 1 Gb memory.)

So the problem maybe that you are running out of disk space (for swapping memory between applications). You should have a minimum of 4-5 Gbytes disk space free if you are running multiple applications at the same time.

Try clearing the cache too in SL. Goto "Preferences..." and select "Network" tab, and clear the cache that may be causing problems.

Restart your computer too, and if possible, optimize your system. When your disk space is running low, the disk space is usually very fragmented. That could cause problems because it slows down the performance.

You should also do some basic system maintenance. The Mac usually does its house-cleaning at 4 AM in the background, but most people put the computer to sleep at that time, so the system never got any maintenance. To manually do the system maintenance, get the OnyX software from http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/20070 and execute the routine maintenance and optimization. It should clear most of the crashing problems.

First and foremost, *thanks* for all the replys!

More info on this issue:

My MBP has >= 10 GB free disk space (on a 120 GB drive and I'll be freeing up another 5-10 GB in the next few days), so disk space should not be an issue.

I've cleared the SL cache, i'll try again from time to time. I don't hold high hopes for this "solution" though.

I defrag my MBP once a year or so (DiskWarrior, TechTool Pro), and it shouldn't be needed much with Tiger (only when many files > 20 MB is my understanding). I've been trying to put it off this year until Leopard comes out. Maybe I'll have to bite that bullet when I get a couple of free hours of MBP downtime.

Generally, my MBP runs 24x7, so the Unix maintenance tasks will always run on schedule. That is definitely *not* the problem.

It *seems to me* the problem is either with a bug in the Mac SL client or poor design of the Mac SL client.

Modern applications should be virtual memory friendly and admittedly run slow if RAM is tight, but not crash (short of the swap device completely filling up) for heaven's sake.

I don't want to have to give up multi-tasking to run SL, that is ridiculous (well, ok, *I* think that is ridiculous

I'm hoping this issue is taken care of by the good Linden folks at some point in the future. Although I can live with it now, it's annoying to my SL friends when I just drop off from time to time.

And to be sure, none of the above is intended as a complaint of any of your replies! Thanks for *all* for the replies, they were *all* appreciated.

And I *will* clear that cache from time to time.