Second Life Crashes my Mac Requiring Hardware REBOOT

The last three time I have used Second Life (1.18.0 (6) ) I have had to do a hardware reboot. The client becomes very slow. It is usually if I am using a physical vehicle (speeder bike). Then it will become very choppy. The cursor will become very choppy and start moving all over the screen unpredictably. Then it will completely freeze and you cannot force-quit the application. The only way out is to TURN OFF THE COMPUTER and restart. This is HORRIBLE.

WTF LL?

Using MacBook Pro 2.4GHZ with NVIDIA 8600MGT 256MB.

The client runs fine when I reboot in Vista on the same hardware. In fact, it runs with about twice the FPS as the Mac version. WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF

-=GE=-

well there have been issues reported on some games, and SL, that the Geforce 8600s in the MBPs have not been performing right. Most think its a driver or firmware issue that will be fixed... My MBP with a radeon x1600 works just fine.

I have the same problem, everythings fine but if you teleport somewhere and there's lots of objects to draw then it just freezes - no option to force quit the app, just have to reboot again. I'm sure it probably is a problem with the video drivers, but its quite annoying - especially if you're about to deliver the punchline for a joke...

Apple needs to stop making damn phones and start making computers that work right!!

Ugh

-=GE=-

computers?

you mean Apple, the great makers of iPods and iPhones is going to make computers now too?

I actually had someone ask me if the "people" that made iPods made computers...

When your mac freezes, try presssing key F11. This works most of the times for me. The frozen SL screen will disappear and when you click your mouse it should reappear in the middle of the screen. You can then force quit SL with "apple force quit" without having to reboot your mac.

Da-yamm! I've been thinking about buying a MacBook Pro 15" with max RAM, just so I can back into the Apple infrastructure (tunes, phone, tv, etc) and have a UNIX based OS, but posts like these are giving me second thoughts.

I used Macs for years and then bowed down to the MicroBloat God for business reasons. Is it worth it to go back?

Klang,

It really depends upon your reasons. I've been a Mac person since they first came out, but am familiar with all sorts of systems. With the Intel Macs you get BSD-based *nix under the hood, complete with apache and many other standard *nix-y things. Great GUI plus a powerful command line under the hood.

Do Macs crash? Yes -- all computers do. And a kernel panic in unix-land is the equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death. But it very rarely happens. I've measured uptimes in terms of months on my own system. Not as much recently, mainly due to SL memory leakage -- most of which has now been fixed. A badly written app can hog most any system if written "properly".

I don't worry about viruses or worms, generally. I can dual boot into Windows XP if I need to using Boot Camp. (But normally, I'd just use Parallels and run it in a virtual machine.) And I just priced one of the latest MacBook Pros vs. a comparable Dell laptop. Similarly configured, the Mac was cheaper. (However, it is possible you don't need the same level of configuration and the options are fewer on the Mac side.)

However, if you just want to work with iTunes, an iPhone, and AppleTV, the first two can definitely be done on the Windows side; maybe the third, too. They definitely give you a taste for current Apple design.

If you go Mac, be aware, that it's different enough that you will almost certainly be annoyed at the differences initially, so allow some time to get used to the slightly different idioms, say a week or two. People I know have tried & hated it at first when I've loaned Macs because their Windows system went kaput. After a week, it turned into "you'll get the Mac back when you pry it from my cold, dead hands."

If you have an Apple Store nearby, definitely stop in to get some hands-on. If not, hopefully another retailer will allow you enough hands-on to get a feel. Or maybe check with a friend who might have one.

I'd go for it, but hey, I'm already biased!

I use a 2.4 GHZ macbook pro 17'' 'Santa Rosa' and I have the crash issue that many latest version macbook pro users met.
SL runs slower and slower then the pointer itslef runs at 1 fps (!!), image freezes and then... SL totally frozen screen of death (no, it is not blue under mac osX).

I installed XP via Bootcamp 1.3 on the same computer, and oh my god, things run so smoothly and do not crash, I rediscover SL! )

Conclusion: Hardware looks fine, issue comes either from mac osx driver (^^) or a not-so-good mac version of SL for 1.18

I actually took my (1st gen) MBP to the apple genius because it would spontaneously reboot- not crash of freeze, but all of a sudden, black screen and start-up chime.

The genius opened the Activity monitor then launched SL, and it was apparent that SL was only using one of the processors.

So I sold my 1st gen, and bough the latest & greatest(?) 15" 2.4ghz w/ 256MB ram, and now SL will freeze up the mac, forcing me to reboot. (as others have mentioned).

Shouldnt SL be (re)written to take advantage of Mac dual processors? or is it only Mac duals it cant handle? I dont want to reboot in PC mode (bootcamp) I'd consider using Paralels, but now I have to buy Windows!!

I may as well chime in too. MacBook Pro 2.4GHz Santa Rosa 15" owner, NVidia 8600M and 4GB of ram.

SL just keeps crashing, and almost everytime it's a complete and utter crash. I've never seen any program take the OS down with it quite like SL has been doing. The mouse will usually not respond neither will any buttons on the keyboard. Even the powerbutton gives no response (until it's held long enough to force the reboot).

SL starts fine after log in, it's quite fast actually. After a few minutes the frame rate starts to drop, which is probably the result of everything in the distance loading in. What confuses me is that the crash doesn't happen when you might expect. You'd think that it would slow to a crawl, the fans would be screaming away and then boom, but that's never been the case.

Everytime it dies it's just seemingly random as I'm moving around. I'll alt click and move my camera towards something and then bam, everything locks. Sometimes the mouse will still move, but can't click on anything. Sometimes, nothing happens and it just sits there. Almost every single time (3 to 5 times out of 50-60 crashes) Second life will close and the warning will pop up, and the system is recoverable. Most of the time, there is no chance of recovery.

And believe me, I tried waiting for it to recover. For 10 minutes I sat and waited for something to happen, but no dice. This is where I noted an odd occurence as well.

Typically, when something locks, the CPU sit's near 100% usage, and the fans are blaring. But not with Second Life.
In fact, the fans seem to cycle. They gradually get louder until they hit their max, remain there for a minute or so, then fall back down to a lower speed for a few minutes. This just repeats in an endless cycle. Note: I have SMCFan control sitting in my menubar displaying the current fan speed, but once SL crashes, it does not update. I can't get an actual reading of what the fan speed or CPU temperature is.

Shutting the lid to put the computer to sleep also does not work. In fact it seems to cut the hardware off from the OS completly. I have the keyboard backlight set to time out after 30 seconds, and 30 seconds after a crash, the keyboard backlight shuts off. Hitting any button should turn it back on, but it does not. The OS simply does not respond.


Honestly I'm not sure who's to blame. The hardware is not at fault, as XP BootCamp runs the windows version of SL flawlessly.
So is this an Apple fix, relating to the drivers for the video card? I play UT2004 at maximum settings and not once has it crashed. So this makes me think it's not a driver issue.

So is it Linden Lab's issue? I must say I'm apalled by how much nicer the windows version of Second Life is compared to the Mac OS X version. But when it comes down to the crashing issue... I myself used to play SL on a PowerBook G4 1.5 GHz. And while it ran slow as a snail, and crashed seldom, it never, EVER caused a system lockup to the point of being rebooted.

In the end, I guess I will just have to sit here and suffer just as the rest of us. I can't make Linden or Apple fix the mystery issue, and I tire of having to boot into windows just to play in Second Life for a while. So I guess I wait...

-Lansing

That's the part I dread- and that's why I have a Mac. I dont want to run in Windows to use SL.

Not only would this require the purchase of Windows and Bootcamp/Parallels, it would be a drag to restart in order to use my graphics software, for texture work.

I'm curious- when running bootcamp/windows, is there a way to see if it's using the processors evenly, as opposed to 10.4.10?

I suppose the good part is that MBP at least offers the option of booting in windows...

My MBP did this all the time... I had a hunch it was a gfx related thing... then I enabled Open GL Vertex shading... and it stopped the hard crashing... might work for you too...?

Thank God I have discovered this forum...if only to learn that I am not alone. I have an iMAC, 2MB, GeForce 7300 GT.....near the "top of the line," but after the latest SL version, I last about 5 to 10 minutes (if I am lucky) before I crash. Then when I sign on again...I am under water, have huge man-breasts, etc. etc. I have to wait ten minutes before there is a chance of a normal screen appearance. Before the update, this happened once in a while..now ALL THE TIME! Somewhere, somehow, someone has f***ed up big time. When I first got the iMAC it was heaven..now it is hell.

In effect..no point in being in SL at all now.......isn't anyone thinking about this in a serioius way at Linden? Is there no "fix"?

Is SL trying to do too much? A year ago, despite the lack of the bells and whistles of today, it was en enjoyable experience....

Is anybody trying Repair Permissions?

I had my first hard crash last night, not sure if it was related but I was in an extremely grief-lagged sim with god knows how many transparent and invisible prim noise makers and pusher and what not, I turned on see transparent and moved my camera through the prim-soup and bam.. locked lol. Kinda surprised, normally even the worst graphic lag in SL has left my OS running stable enough to kill the client.

Not sure if this was new-viewer related or just a worst case lag scenario.

Yes, I repair permissions on a regular basis.
Hell, I went repairing beyond permissions and bought a new MBP!

I'm siding with the faulty Mac OS theory- since it's not a problem when a Mac is running Windows (via bootcamp/Parallels)

But then, who's "fault" is it that SL doesn't use both processors evenly when in OS X?

I'm having the same issue... I can't even get onto the internet with Safari or get Mail to retrieve messages after a successful Force Quit of SL. Most of the time I have to do a hard reboot. I get about 40-45 min on the grid before this happens... I may try to load this on my G4 iMac... Pretty disappointed that my $3k MBP can't handle it!

Lerxst

SL, as written, is apparently not multi-threaded, so only runs on a single processor, at least on my MacBook Pro Core Duo.

There are other reports in the forum of bad crashing, especially on MacBook Pro Core *2* Duos, the most recent vintage.

As for whose fault? Not multi-threaded, running on a single processor -- LL. Windows users also have a similar problem and usually need to set SL to run on a single processor to avoid crashes. (I think this is called "affinity".)

Basic crashing on the Mac OS? LL's fault again -- especially the versions that just gobbled up memory.

Kernel panics where there was available memory? Two-fold: brought on by bad programming practices @ LL, but a kernel panic? Probably a video driver, OpenGL, or other low-level OS issue. Blame Apple for that. The system *should* never kernel panic. (That's the screen is overlayed in grey with restart instructions in multiple languages. A really bad crash, equivalent to Window's Blue Screen of Death.) To cause a kernel panic I believe something needs to go fundamentally wrong at a pretty low level of the operating system.

And I haven't seen the problems reported here on my system -- but I'm not discounting them. As I said, I have an early vintage system. Have you tried a total clean install of SL? (The "nuke & pave" approach -- just a suggestion, may not fix anything.) Good luck with it!

Mine did that too...I didn't read all these posts, but how I fixed it on my Powerbook G4 was to disable voice BEFORE I logged in. Then it stopped crashing.

That stinks I know...but some MAC users will have to be without voice until the next patch (let's hope).

F11? What's that supposed to do? I'm pressing F11 right now and nothing happens.

I experience the same horrible instability with my MBP 17" 2.4 8600m GT. I have a feeling it has something to do with texture cache or some such. When SL goes down and doesn't take my entire system with it, I get all kinds of graphical glitches on the desktop requiring a reboot to clear. Could this be some issue somehow with texture cache not working as it should?

CCC

I have experienced these same freezes since I started. But I've turned down all the graphic settings in Preferences...since then no problems...

I suggest the following (it may not be as pretty, but it helps)

GRAPHICS -- lower draw distance to 128

GRAPHICS DETAIL -- deselect 1st two : enable vertex... and enable bumpmapping...
Terrain Detail Low
Lower the last 4 details settings, all about the same level, maybe 1/4

ADVANCED GRAPHICS
Lower Fog Distrance Ratio: 1.7 or there abouts
Max Particlel Count 256

Try these, it has improved my SL experience!!!

I have tried this crap and I still get the crashes. When I boot into Windows Vista I am able to run at all max settings with great speed.

This is unacceptable. This needs to be fixed immediately.

sure it needs to be, the Mac version is poorly programmed and they dont really care, they just care if it kinda sorta runs... we can want it improved, but its just not going to happen, they have more important things to deal with.