Frequent random hangs and crashes

[Lúthien]

I'm sorry to say this, because I certainly love what ASP offers in terms of functionality: but I have never before had so many bugs and crashes with a professional piece of software before.

Until now I have (officially) filed two bugs, such as that flickering 3D layer rendering issues when using multiple threads - and as far as I am aware none are addressed yet. Of course I understand that the dev's time is limited - heck, I work as a programmer myself as well, so I'm well aware of that. But all the same, I found that these issues were impacting so much on my current animation project that it became a serious blocker.

Eventually I worked around that 3D issue by accepting the slow one-thread rendering workaround. But it wasn't fixed in the update that came after.

And now another problem pops up: on a number of more complex scenes I get hangs and crashes - some predictable and repeatable, such as when copying *anything* from a certain layer, and some completely random - the app simply freezes, the dreaded BeachBall of Death appears and I can either sit and wait for a time to see if it unlocks (which even can happen after 15 minutes if I am lucky), or that I have to force kill the app and accept the loss of some work. Sometimes it even hangs upon saving.

Whatever the case, it does not work very pleasantly.

Of course I can go through the grind of officially filing a bug report, but given my previous experiences I wonder if that would help?
You know, it would already feel a lot better if I had the idea that these issues were taken seriously. But I have no idea.

ASP 11.2
MacBook Pro (Retina, Mid 2012) 16 GB
OSX 10.11.3
NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M


EDIT: it looks as if it's one of those classic "non-allocated pointer bugs" in C

27/02/16 21:21:14,819 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp.54112[8559]) Service exited due to signal: Abort trap: 6
27/02/16 21:21:16,650 ReportCrash[8714]: Saved crash report for Anime Studio[8559] version 11.2 (18233) to /Users/luthien/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Anime Studio_2016-02-27-212116_doriath.crash
27/02/16 21:21:36,405 Anime Studio[8721]: BUG in libdispatch client: kevent[EVFILT_MEMORYSTATUS] add: "Operation not supported" - 0x2d
27/02/16 21:21:36,683 Anime Studio[8721]: assertion failed: 15D21: libxpc.dylib + 63930 [61AB4610-9304-354C-9E9B-D57198AE9866]: 0x89

From the crash report:

Code: Select all

Process:               Anime Studio [8559]
Path:                  /Applications/Anime Studio Pro.app/Contents/MacOS/Anime Studio
Identifier:            com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp
Version:               11.2 (18233)
Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        ??? [1]
Responsible:           Anime Studio [8559]
(...)
Crashed Thread:        0  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
Performing @selector(menuEvent:) from sender NSMenuItem 0x7fa470892460
abort() called
*** error for object 0x7fa471111460: pointer being freed was not allocated

Global Trace Buffer (reverse chronological seconds):
1045.376454  CFNetwork                 	0x00007fff851a5303 TCP Conn 0x7fa47215c6b0 complete. fd: 24, err: 0
1045.376557  CFNetwork                 	0x00007fff85233b1d TCP Conn 0x7fa47215c6b0 event 1. err: 0
1045.534594  CFNetwork                 	0x00007fff851a45d3 TCP Conn 0x7fa47215c6b0 started
1045.842386  CFNetwork                 	0x00007fff851a5303 TCP Conn 0x7fa4749c2e70 complete. fd: 20, err: 0
1045.842517  CFNetwork                 	0x00007fff85233b1d TCP Conn 0x7fa4749c2e70 event 1. err: 0

Thread 0 Crashed:: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread
0   libsystem_kernel.dylib        	0x00007fff89aaa002 __pthread_kill + 10
1   libsystem_pthread.dylib       	0x00007fff8385b5c5 pthread_kill + 90
2   libsystem_c.dylib             	0x00007fff937ea6e7 abort + 129
3   libsystem_malloc.dylib        	0x00007fff8c306070 free + 425
4   com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp	0x000000010327988b M_Mesh::DeleteEdge(int, int, int) + 2213
5   com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp	0x0000000103383000 MainLayer::HandleMessage(LM_Message*) + 27464
6   com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp	0x000000010317fe16 LM_Handler::SendMessage(int) + 50
7   com.smithmicro.AnimeStudioProApp	0x000000010319ec85 -[LMi_ContentView menuEvent:] + 169
8   libsystem_trace.dylib     
(...)

[Lúthien]

(continued)

Digging a little further, there's also these messages in the console:

- UI updates were forcibly disabled by application "Anime Studio Pro" ...
- UI updates were finally enabled by application "Anime Studio Pro" ...
- saved hang report (caused by me killing the hanging process)
- BUG in libdispatch client
- Anime Studio: assertion failed: 15D21: libxpc.dylib
- kernel[0]: process Anime Studio caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 252; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 45028
- kernel[0]: process Anime Studio thread 741386 caught burning CPU! ( ) It used more than 50% CPU (Actual recent usage: 62%) over 180 seconds. thread lifetime cpu usage 151.869769 seconds, (149.635217 user, 2.234552 system) ledger info: balance: 90005854369 credit: 151419882387 debit: 61414028018 limit: 90000000000 (50%) period: 180000000000 time since last refill (ns): 144043994842

... etcetera, etcetera.

Let me know if you want to have the full reports, I'll save them.


EDIT

and another one:

27/02/16 22:02:38,790 Anime Studio[8880]: 22:02:38.789 WARNING: 140: This application, or a library it uses, is using the deprecated Carbon Component Manager for hosting Audio Units. Support for this will be removed in a future release. Also, this makes the host incompatible with version 3 audio units. Please transition to the API's in AudioComponent.h.

[Lúthien]

- and another update.

Tonight it became so bad that I really could not work any more. Everything that I did was slow as treacle and every couple of changes to the scene caused a crash.
In the end I searched here on the forum if anyone had ever similar problems, and there was indeed someone. In that thread it was mentioned that disabling or enabling the GPU acceleration seemed to have an effect. So I tried, and though the GPU settings are still strangely absent from the general preferences (even though they were mentioned there), it is a checkbox in the Display Quality popup.

I disabled it, and that seems to have alleviated the problems somewhat.

But still, I have always had it switched on before, and it surely never caused that many problems.

Can it be that a recent CUDA driver update is to blame? I thought that a GPU was supposed to make graphics perform better and provide parallel computing support, not to completely cripple applications.