MacBook freezes while working with Pubsliher

[Schubi63]

Dear developer,

unfortunately I believe that Publiher is causing my MacBook to freeze.
I'm working with my MacBook since 4 years and I would say, that it freezed wihtin that time for 3 to 5 times alltogether. But now, that I have bought and started my 1st project with Affinity Publisher, my computer freezed the 3rd time within 2 days. And the last "big changes" on my system where: installing and running Publisher.

Publisher is not the only running program of course. And I guess it has something to do with Firefox running parallel (lots of open tabs,  YouTube running)

I there any possibility like Beta version / console log files / to find out if Publisher is the reason?
And can I change some preferences to prevent that behaviour until Publisher is no longer causing a freeze?

 

I am using:
Affinity Publisher 1.8.3
Firefox 70
macOS Sierra 10.13.6
MacBookPro (13 inch, Early 2015); 3.1 GHz i7 CPU; 16 GB RAM

[thomaso]

On 5/4/2020 at 10:09 AM, Schubi63 said:

my MacBook (...) freezed

What do you mean with "freeze" for the entire MacBook? A freeze most often occurs as a lack of UI feedback while an app is very busy. Sometimes such a freeze appears in the Activity Monitor with a text supplement like "... not reacting" after an apps name, even if it is working in the background and just needs time.

Since your issue isn't reported yet a lot (or at all?) you could give more info about the situation, e.g. which apps appear to be affected by the freeze or what actions in APub you were doing when a freeze occurs. Also it might be helpful if you describe how you tried to solve the freeze, in particular what way worked and what didn't.

[Schubi63]

On 5/8/2020 at 1:33 AM, thomaso said:

A freeze most often occurs as a lack of UI feedback while an app is very busy.

Hi thomaso,

yes, I know that most often a freeze occurs as a lack of UI feedback, and is most happening when an app is very busy.
But I ment the whole system > my MacBook freezed. Not only one app which runs out of UI feedback. So I cannot switch any apps or go to activity monitor or use terminal (e.g. top) or whatever. It the MacBook is just freezed. I cannot do anything. Just hold "turn off" button and then restart the system.

What I did in APub:
I'm working on a flyer with lots of images I have to layout. Which means I was often importing (linking not copying into the document), moving, creating frames, scaling images and duplicating pages with those images to create variations of image-layouts and so on.

 

What I did so far:
I have updated my MacOS to the latest version, all the apps from Mac AppStore, my browser Firefox
I tried to have only the app APub open. Seems to be fine then.
I am also spectating the temperatures of the system (GPU, CPU...) from that on, to see if it's a heating problem of my system.

Actually I cannot say, but I guess it had something to do when Youtube ist rendering in the background

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Schubi63 said:

But I ment the whole system > my MacBook freezed.

That is why I asked, because the "whole system" hardly freezes since its running some dozens of single tasks simultaneously. So what you visually see as not reacting are apps with a user interface and feedback. Obviously the Finder is one of these apps. This is the one you need to activate a different app, e.g. Activity Monitor.

What are you doing if a freeze occurs, how do you get rid of it? Just force an entire macbook shutdown? Does Cmd-Opt-Esc react in that situation? If the latter works and you want to detect whats going on in the background you could try to keep Activity Monitor opened and may be able this way to switch to it once a freeze occurs.

Youtube is video which needs to decompressed and displayed. Also Affinity is graphically quite demanding and uses the so-called discrete graphic card of your macbook (which is also used for an external monitor). That means regardless of available RAM and disk space those processes together might reach the limit of your GPU. If that's the case you hardly have another chance than not using both apps at the same time, unless you would install a newer graphic card (which on macbooks is economically not really efficient). However, this should not cause such a wide freeze but particular slowdowns only.

To detect if the CPU/GPU are at their limit:

While running Youtube + working in Affinity check in Activity Monitor occasionally what processes are most processor demanding. For more CPU and GPU control open the separate CPU and GPU windows (Cmd-3 / Cmd-4) and get additional feedback, for about the recent 15-30 minutes. If you detect or suspect a process to be too demanding force-quit this process in the Activity Monitor to get aware which process is either the culprit or possibly not really essential in this situation.

Other approaches:

1. Boot in Safe mode (Shift) to cause a system file check and reset of some basics. Then reboot normal again.

2. Boot in a new, virgin user account, work as usual and see if you get the same experience. If not, then the culprit is quite likely in your user library folder.

3. You could check if any unexpected app is installed or process is running, maybe even any insecure. Therefore you could install Etrecheck https://etrecheck.com/  and run it with any default setting. Then look if it reports any unexpected app or process, some of them appear in the protocol in red type, others don't.

4. Use a different browser app when running Youtube.
Alternatively delete your entire Firefox user cache folder (you will lose custom prefs this way, like appearance, bookmarks, history, plugins etc.)

5. Research in the macOS protocols. Open the console app, select the sections in the sidebar step by step and possibly limit the results via entries in the search field. Even though you might not understand whats displayed it may be a way to detect a process or specific error which appears suspicious and is obviously related to a freeze, just by its date and time. That info might help to find the culprit app or process – but it also can be time consuming and even useless.

5. Reinstall your macbook from a TimeMachine Backup. This way cache files and some preferences are ignored and may prevent the issue in case it was related to any of those files. Ideally you would install a new system (not from backup) and use only user-related data from backup. Either the Installer or The Migration Assistant.app supports you with this.
[A few years ago I had the fan going mad almost all the time. I detected in Activity Monitor some processes which were related to spotlight (e.g. md, md-worker et al.). Deleting the spotlight database did not help, although I thought if they have to create their databases new and from scratch the issues couldn't exist any more. After reinstalling the system + installing user data & apps form the backup the macbook run smoother than before.]