08-28-2008 13:50
Indeed, this Release Candidate has extra code checking turned on for crashes. This means we sometimes cause the RC viewer to crash MORE often.

... Now why would we do that??

The special code is called "Thread Monitoring" (or the "watchdog";). What it does is: constantly detects when Second Life becomes frozen for a period longer than 20 seconds. If you are frozen that long, it FORCES a crash-- but it spits out a very detailed log of where & what the viewer code was doing when things went wrong.

It's like setting a trap for the many invisible ways where crash bugs may be lurking. When the Thread monitor catches 'em, we can find out exactly what part of code is responsible.

When we look at the hundreds of crash reports over a 1-day period, we can see what are the most common crashes that plague our Residents. You can be sure we'll try to fix those for the next iteration (RC2, RC3, etc). By the end of the RC cycle, this viewer will have less places to crash than even the official viewer 1.20.

That means you are helping every time you run the RC and it crashes! Be sure to let the reporter "Send its report" to Linden Lab. There is no personal information in the crash report.

We call this "Crash Hunting":
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Viewer_Crash_Reporting#Viewer_Crash_Hunters


Sometimes people post their log file, SecondLifeCrashReport.log, directly to the Issue Tracker. You can find out where this file gets written on your computer by reading more here:

https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417&task=knowledge&questionID=4209