Catalina crash

1

I can make Catalina crash quite often–not bragging, just offering information.
Hardware: 2019 4K Retina 21 inch iMac with 16 GB memory
MacOS: 10.15.6 (but also happened with earlier versions of Catalina)
Always open apps: Finder, Safari, Mail, Calendar, Messages, TV
Development apps open: Xojo, Xcode, Simulator (I am working on a new iOS app)

Latest crash happened when I started a build on Xojo and while it was running launched Intuit Quicken accounting program. Even Force Quit will not work, I have to pull the plug on the iMac. I would say the crash happens almost every day if I try to have too much going on at the same time. Very un-Mac like.

2

Do you have a SSD or spinning drive?

Sounds like you’re exceeding memory usage, which is pulling on the drive. The last time I had situation like this was a couple of years ago, when I trying to do things that I know were using GBs of memory and poor old El Cap, couldn’t cope.

Doing a clean install of the OS, then restoring my data and apps from a backup helped to reduce the machine going all crappy when I performed these tasks.

3

Old fashioned spinning drive.
I am sure you are correct about asking the OS to cope with lots of stuff. Isn’t that what a good OS is supposed to handle? Catalina is not only slow it also crashes. Reminds me of some Windows releases. I just have to start being more careful with what I am doing at once. I suspect that Xcode is a factor as I am sure the Apple engineers have Xcode doing things in the OS that ordinary apps can’t do.

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4

Monitor the memory used by Xojo. Since about forever Xojo has a memory leak where the memory goes up and up.

Try to create a different user. Perhaps the user has problems.

Using Xojo on Catalina on a new MacBook Air without problems. Catalina is quite stable here. 10.5.3 and not updating to the latest dot release.

5

A LOT of the problems I had with Catalina, were down to Migration Assistant not doing it’s job (at least that’s what Apple said). Doing a clean install and then manually moving my data, re-installing my apps really made a difference, but it cost me two days, and every once in a while I still find something that I forgot. Thankfully I have a complete “clone” of my drive running 10.14 (not TM, CCC), so I can open it up and get what I need.

6

At the risk of stating the obvious (but you don’t mention it), did you apply the 10.15.6 Supplemental Update? This addressed memory leak issues that were introduced in 10.15.6.

While most of the commentary around this involved problems with running VMs, the issue was by no means confined to that. Personally I could not count on more than a couple of days’ uptime without a kernel panic. Usually these occurred overnight, for me to find in the morning. Since then it’s been peachy.

7

How does one know if the Supplemental Update is installed? When I click Software Update… button it says that the software is up to date

8

Presumably, it was eventually rolled into 10.15.6, and indeed the Catalina standalone installer. If you updated to 10.15.6 in the last few weeks, you probably got it. :slight_smile:

9

There is something to remember when talking about Xojo memory:

If you work for 10 hours on a project without quiting the IDE, you can undo all of the works doneissuing a series of cmd-z (ctrl+z).

This means all of these changes are stored somewhere (I suppose on memory, but I do not really know).

At last, I started to quit all unneeded applications, shut down Internet, then reboot and only run Xojo at application creation time to avoid any interference (noise from elsewhere) with the build process.