Trouble in Macland

by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 2, 2004 7:56 PM EST
The G5 has been crashing a lot lately; I complained about Adium being unstable, well it got to the point where I had to move back to an older build of the Alpha. Granted that we are talking about an alpha build of an application and the fact that it can run 24/7 normally without problems is pretty impressive.

Yesterday the number of errors grew significantly, and that's what forced me to migrate back to an older build of the client (2/9/04). I'm going to stick with this one until there's truly a compelling feature that'll make me want to upgrade. That's what i get for being a little too eager :)

An application that has historically never crashed for me was Unison - my newsgroup reader. I was browsing through some newsgroups yesterday (I got my start on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips) and the application just kept on crashing. I would quit and restart Unison and it would still crash. The rest of the OS remained untouched but it was having some serious issues.

Then today, I was doing some work and I went to go click on something on my secondary display and poof, my mouse pointer disappeared. I could see the mouse pointer on the primary display, but no mouse pointer on the secondary display. The mouse was actually making it over to the secondary display as I could still click on things and move windows around, but the pointer had vanished. I tried not rebooting to save my life but in the end, I had to shut everything down and reboot.

When the mouse problem happened I had around 2GB of stuff in memory, so I've got no earthly clue what caused it. I wasn't doing anything too strenuous at that particular moment, and closing all the applications individually didn't rectify the situation so I'm not really sure what caused it.

I'm not jumping to any conclusions yet, but I'm going to be keeping a careful watch on the system and I'll report any findings I have. Has anyone here encountered similar problems?
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  • jeffosx - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link

    the other thing to do is repair permissions (disk utility)...
  • Jasenko - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link

    What's your uptime?
    It looks like you would need a reboot. I know this sounds silly, but OSX is not as bullet proof as some other Unices, mainly because it was made with the average user in mind. I would try logout/logon first though, sometime, some application goes wild and it can only be killed by logging out. If that application is on system level, reboot is the only option.
  • ViRGE - Tuesday, March 2, 2004 - link

    While OS X is like any other modern OS in terms of memory protection, it's also like any other modern OS in that things tend to cascade. If Adium started having some major issues, there's always the chance that it caused the rest of the system to go haywire too; it certainly wouldn't be the first time I've seen misbehaving programs to try to take the rest of the system with them. As long as the system stays stable after the reboot though, I think you'll be fine.

    PS Your 1 month is over this Friday; any hint on the verdict? ;-)

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