Photo 2.4.0 disabled my Mac

[GavinEadie]

 

What Application are you using? [Designer/Photo/Publisher] ... Photo

Are you using the latest release version? ... yes

Can you reproduce it? ... sadly, no

Does it happen for a new document? ... Yes -- that is I had been working on it for about 10 minutes.

If not can you upload a document that shows the problem? .. No

If you cannot provide a sample document then please give an accurate description of the problem for example it should include most of the following:

   What is your operating system and version ... macOS Sonoma 14.3.1

   Is hardware acceleration (in Preferences > Performance) ON or OFF ? ... whatever the default is

   What happened for you (and what you expected to happen) ... this is where it gets difficult.  What happened is that Photos stopped responding.  In fact, nothing would respond -- I tried all the tricks.  Force-quit could not be invoked from the dock or from the three-key method.  Some activity was possible including, thankfully, a screenshot (enclosed).  I used Terminal on another Mac and could ssh into the unresponsive one -- I did a "ps", a "sudo kill -9 nnnn" on the Affinity process, which did not terminate the process or gain responsiveness back, and ultimately a "sudo reboot" to restart the Mac.

   Provide a recipe for creating the problem (step-by-step what you did) ... the best I can do is give you the screenshot.  I will note that my intention was to rectify a fisheye lens image (or a part of it), had tried the "Layer > New Live Filter Layer > Distort > Lens Distortion ..." but that didn't produce the result I want.  I looked for other "Lens" actions via the Help menu, found what you see in the screenshot ... end of story.

   Screenshots (very handy) or a screen capture/video .. OK, done.

   Any unusual hardware (like tablets or external monitors or drives that may affect things) or relevant other applications like font managers or display managers ... No.  I do use an external display and Photo was using it.

   Did this same thing used to work and if so have you changed anything recently? (software or hardware) ... I've never had this happen before.  AND, I'm can't claim absolutely that Photo caused the problem (Photo might have happened to be the active program when something else bad happened).

I was hoping I could get a kernel dump or an application crash report .. no such luck.  I'll look through the crash logs and see if I can find anything.  I wish I could give you more to work with; this was a nasty failure.

Terminal SSH.txt

[NathanC]

Hi @GavinEadie,

Unfortunately thus far in my tests I've not been able to re-produce a problem by following the steps provided on my machine, so it's likely going to be quite difficult to pinpoint and therefore log particularly with the info that's available.

10 hours ago, GavinEadie said:

Is hardware acceleration (in Preferences > Performance) ON or OFF ? ... whatever the default is

By default Metal/Hardware Acceleration is turned on, but it may also be worth toggling this off in Preferences > Performance if the problem can be re-produced.

10 hours ago, GavinEadie said:

I was hoping I could get a kernel dump or an application crash report .. no such luck.  I'll look through the crash logs and see if I can find anything.  I wish I could give you more to work with; this was a nasty failure.

App hangs don't typically generate a .crash file in console, but if you are able to re-produce an app hang in any similar circumstance in the future you could try logging the app events to the console, but this is dependant on it being re-produced again to set up the console log:

1. Close down all background applications running on the Mac and close all Affinity apps

2. Open the Mac Console app and select your Mac name from the 'Devices' list on the sidebar

3. Press 'Start' along the top and it will start continuously logging messages

4. Start Affinity Photo 2 and make a note of the specific time you started the app (this makes it easier for us to track in the log)

5. Go through your workflow

6. When the app hangs, make a note of the specific time of the freeze and open the Console app again and press 'Pause'

7. Press CMD + A to highlight the entire log and CMD + C to copy it

8. Paste the copied log contents into a text editor, such as TextEdit or Pages and save a copy of the file.

[GavinEadie]

Thanks, Nathan .. I've no idea what caused the freeze (and, as noted, Photo could have been the victim, not the cause), but it would seem that reproducing a sequence of edits of an image would be hard to reproduce because so many actions are like "vary saturation till it looks good".  Regardless, if this happens again I won't be able to take the steps you suggested -- I could move the cursor, but quitting or launching any apps wasn't possible.

However, I pulled the unified log for the time around the failure

sudo log show --info --debug --start '2024-02-28 18:00:00' --end '2024-02-28 19:20:00'

That generated a file of 1.5 million lines (350MB) which I will send if you want it.  What I have enclosed are two derivations from that file: (1) all the lines containing the Photo process number and (2) all the lines containing "affinity" .. there's a lot of dross but maybe something that helps.  The SIGKILL from the ssh session on the other Mac occurs around 19:10.

affinity-process-log.txt photo-process-log.txt