Sketchup freezes after working for short time.

OK, here's and update (posted to sketchucation and Google Groups). I chose to work with two folks who were experiencing "SketchUp Leopard" crash / hang issues, and try to drill down what the issues were.

Case 1: Machine gets unusable using SketchUp 7. Symptom - it was determined that WindowServer (the UI-serving application for Macs) memory usage continues to grow. We took the same SketchUp Model and iMac model and couldn't reproduce the problem. We booted in Safe Mode (to eliminate non-essential kernel extensions) but this runs in software rendering mode. We then added the video driver to render OpenGL on the graphics card. No changes. We even called Apple support, and they were stumped. Best suggestion: take the machine (now out of AppleCare warranty) to the nearest Genius Bar. While SketchUp helps manifest the problem, it's a hardware + Mac OS X issue (/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/Resources/WindowServer for the curious).

Case 2: Machine crashes frequently while using SketchUp on Leopard. Looking at the crash stacks (/Library/Logs/CrashReporter), we narrowed this down to two likely culprits: a printer driver, and ruby plugins. For the printer issue, I did some googling on Epson

printers. Two things made me nervous about this. First, it was a printer that's only sold in some countries so not likely a printer

driver that has millions of users. Second, the printer driver used ESC/P (Epson Standard Code for Printers - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P and specifically a raster to ESC/P driver). Older than PCL, IIRC (and that's 1984ish). Someone had reported that Epson support had suggested switching to Gutenprint (formerly Gimp-Print, at http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/). So far, this seems to have helped. For the ruby plugin issue, there's no easy way to troubleshoot 200+ ruby scripts that likely range from zero-to-limited software testing. A good rule of thumb for any program with plugins: when you run into trouble, try unloading some of these and keeping only the necessary ones and add in over time. My suggestion was to binary tree them, i.e. add 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8 etc... to eliminate a potential crasher. We're thinking about ways for us to comprehensively test our ruby API and to help plugin writers test their code as well. Feedback welcome on this issue.

So why did I do this and what did we learn?

I understand that users of SketchUp are often professionals who often spend their entire day in front of the product, so crashes and hangs are VERY frustrating. I'd like to thank the two people who when beyond that frustration and helped us track down these issues in greater detail. Hopefully, this greater-than-typical level of detail will be helpful to others if you have to chase down issues like this.

Sorry for those following this thread in Sketchup 7 Pro freezing system - Mac Pro

It was locking us out yesterday so adding link here to the much longer thread.

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