topic Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System in Installation & update

ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 20:59:47 GMT

Ever since I installed the update for Archicad 10 for the Mactel (Mac Pro Duo) Archicad has been crashing the entire system. The problem seems to happen when I am opening Archicad. The problem seems to be randomly intermittent and a bit frustrating. I get the Gray Mac screen telling me that my system has encountered an error and needs to be restarted.

I am wondering if there is any thing I should or can do to fix the problem.

The bigest problem is the intermittent nature of the glitch. I cant seem to figure out if it is a specific file or Archicad in general. I have already reinstalled twice and the problem has not alleviated itself yet.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Karl Ottenstein — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 21:11:41 GMT

Do you have the most recent WIBU driver installed? Even though it is aimed towards supporting 9 and 10 simultaneously, it still might be related to the problem:

http://www.archicadwiki.com/TechNotes/Running_both_AC_10_and_AC_9_on_Intel_based_Macintosh

http://www.archicadwiki.com/Archicad_10/MacTel_version

Karl

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 01:18:19 GMT

Yes I have the latest drivers. I just checked this morning. Sofar I have tried everything and always seem to get my hopes up then I will be opening a file in archicad or changing from one project to another or even just going to the 3-D window and the screen goes gray and I loose everything between my last save and then. Luckily I have developed the habit of saving regularly due to this problem.

This issue is more of a nucence than anything. The benifits of the mac pro is that it takes almost no time to restart.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Karl Ottenstein — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 02:14:26 GMT

Perhaps it is the graphics card, Chris. See this thread:
http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=78351#78351

which may be the same configuration as yours?

I found AC 10 on the MacBook Pro very stable and fast, but you and the other Chris are the first ones I've seen posts from who are using the new Mac Pros.

Check out the graphics test that Dwight links to in the other thread...and the next step may be Apple Support.

Keep us posted ... many of us are drooling over the Mac Pros.

Karl

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Greg Kmethy — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 10:32:22 GMT

Please contact your local tech support with the BugID (BugID's are stored in a text file called CrashSubmissionLog.txt). Nevertheless if your whole system crashes, then it is not (just) an Archicad problem.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:29:16 GMT

Entire system?!
When AC does it, it does it well!

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 14:29:01 GMT

Chriszolezzi, just to make you happy:
you are not alone with this problem, I have it too...

My configuration is the same as yours, and the important part of our configuration in this case is the 4GB of RAM.

But let's start with basics...

Usually the system crash happens when starting AC 10 (at least 5 out of 10 times). If the system survives the startup of archicad you can make sure AC 10 will take the system down within 15 minute.
However if I remove the extra 2GB of RAM (out of 4GB) it works great, without a hitch. No other app ever crashed the system with 4GB of RAM only AC 10.
(Most of the time 2-2,5GB is in use by other apps)
The strange thing is that I tested both pairs of RAM (2x1GB + 2x1GB) with AC 10 separately and they preform OK, but if both pairs (2x1GB + 2x1GB) are installed AC 10 crashes the whole system right away.
I tested with (512+512)+(1GB+1GB) of RAM and (1GB+1GB)+(1GB+1GB) = no luck.
I even tried with 3 different type of RAM - same bad result...
Seems like AC 10 is unable to run with more than 2GB of RAM on Mac Pro.
(Is there anyone with 4GB to confirm the opposite?)

Trashing the pref files did not help, reinstall likewise.
It also crashes with another WIBUKEY.
I also made a test with PPC version of AC 10 and it crashes the entire system just like the Intel version.

And now a surprise: AC 9 works great (however slow because of Rosetta),
but at least it does not crash the whole system.
Now I work with 2x1GB of RAM until I get some response from Graphisoft's Bug Tracking team.

May I ask you Chriszolezzi to try the same as I did: work with just 2 GB of RAM and let us know if that changed anything?

Thanx

_________________
Mac Pro 2x 2.66ghz Dual Core Intel Xeon, 4GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.8 Archicad 10 (intel)

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:02:15 GMT

I have been having the same issue. But it only happens with certian files and not all of my files.

Tried everything to figure it out. Libraries, prefs, reinstall, etc, etc.

Nothing has seemed to work.

In the process of merging files around to see if that fixes anything.

Will try the memory thing to see if that works though.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:37:11 GMT

gkmethy wrote:
Please contact your local tech support with the BugID (BugID's are stored in a text file called CrashSubmissionLog.txt). Nevertheless if your whole system crashes, then it is not (just) an Archicad problem.

The bug ID is "2006-10-21-02-22-52-7141" if any one is interested.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:28:54 GMT

the crashes are related to the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT card. Nvidias drivers have always had some issues on macs and it seems still do.

I upgraded to the ATI Radeon X1900 XT and all my crashes have disappears and i was able to put all my ram, 4 gigs, back in.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:51:21 GMT

Jptrott,

I'm curious, did your MacPro work its way up to using 2GB of its RAM, but no more, ...then crash?

And now, with your new ATI Radeon card your machine can manage all of its RAM, all 4GB, ...and keep on working?

Do you notice a nice speed-up on some operations with twice the RAM?

So the fix is simple, ...a $350 graphics card. What a relief. And all this time we were thinking that Graphisoft needed to upgrade A-10 for us users of Mactels.

This should be good news for others who are thinking about buying a new Mac.

-Jay S.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:01:11 GMT

It kernel panicked the instant archicad opened. or the instant i tried to go to an opengl rendering. When i had more the 2 gbs in it crashed regardless of how much ram was actually being used. As noted below there seems to be either an issue in the nvida driver or on the card itself that has issues or uses some outdated 32-bit code that causes the error when you have more then 2 gb.

Performance has taken a huge jump both with a much better graphics card and full access to 4 gbs of ram. Should have made this move months ago. it was definitely worth the $390

The issue is related to the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT card. It does not deal with openGL very will and has been crashing on many programs that use opengl.

There are two things that you can do to work around it.
1) believe it or not if you limit your memory down to 2 gigs max (seems to be related to a 32 bit to 64 bit addressing issue which is why if you go down to 2 gigs it works), it mitigates the crashing issue and does not cause the crashes to occur.
2) get a different video card any of the ATI cards seem to be fine.

Nvidia is has always had a bit of an issue with mac drivers and it seems like they are holding true to form.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:18:47 GMT

Well, ...we put the Radeon X1900 XT in, in fact we bought TWO and installed both for a whopping 1GB graphics RAM, and zoomed all around a fully landscaped house with a million roof tiles in Open GL.

Then we tried a rendering.

Guess what.

The system climbed to 3.54 GB RAM, ...thought about it for a few minutes, ...and then, ...crashed.

Again.

But it does pull up all the layers of our model (meaning trees, meshes, roof tiles) really fast, and whips around the model really fast.

ArchiCAD crashed, not the whole system. But usually when we restart ArchiCAD the whole system crashes so we've gotten into the habit of just restarting the whole thing instead of letting that happen.

Obviously we have a use for the extra graphics capacity, ...but we sure didn't expect this crash this time.

Ugh.

We were hoping the ATI cards would solve our ArchiCAD problem and liberate all 8GB RAM in our MacPro. Didn't happen.

So we've tried more RAM, better graphics card(s), ...now what?

Ideas?

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Dwight — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:41:35 GMT

how is the hookup with two cards?

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:52:30 GMT

The computer was using 3.55 GB of ram when Archicad crashed however ArchiCAD was only accessing around 2 GB of it. After restarting the system and repeating the same process of turning on all the layers of the project (landscaping, Roof Tiles, Furnishings, etc......) just to do a second check. This time Archicad didn't crash instead it gave me the warning that there is not enough memory to render the model. At this point the activity monitor was showing over 4.5 GB of free ram. This is not right. We should be able to use more than 2Gb of ram.

I still haven't found a good answer to the 16,778,854,000 TB in the memory column right before it crashes. Has anyone else seen this or have any ideas what it means. See Attached picture.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:20:12 GMT

Dwight,

The two cards work, ...fast. We can twirl our model with all trees, roof tiles, people and even the house itself. No hiccups and the Open GL opens quickly. We went with two cards, probably overkill, but have other uses for them besides ArchiCAD.

Unfortunately the model still doesn't render. Advice to add RAM, then to go to an ATI Radeon X1900XT graphics card didn't seem to solve the crash problem. (You do the $$$ math.)

Please see Chris's note.

Ideas?

-Jay S.

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Dwight — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:38:01 GMT

It is probably the tiles taking you over.

Try to render with one lousy sunlight to minimise RAM.

settings attached

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Greg Kmethy — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 07:17:51 GMT

Since the latest System update (10.4.9) Nvidia cards are supposed to work fine too.

The crash that occurs during rendering is probably unrelated to video cards. However, Lightworks is pretty memory-hungry, so a very detailed model might overrun the 4GB memory limit that the 32-bit nature of ArchiCAD and LightWorks imposes on us. For this reason, it does not make much sense to buy 8 gigs of RAM, unless you plan to run other memory-hungry applications along with ArchiCAD .

Some good reads:

http://archicadwiki.com/LightWorks
http://archicadwiki.com/64-bit
http://archicadwiki.com/Bugs/Archicad_10_causes_system_crash_on_OS_X_%28Intel%29

About the rendering crash, please contact your local tech support with the crash ID

Re: ArchiCAD Crashes My Entire System

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 18:35:38 GMT

gkmethy,

Thank you.

I shall read those references.

Resellers should too.

-Jay S.