Re: [Bug-gnubg] gnubg freezing on macOS High Sierra

[Philippe Michel]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2019 at 08:02:46PM +0000, pierre zakia via Bug-gnubg wrote:

> I installed on MacBookAir 2013 gnubg Version GNU Backgammon 1.04.000 
>  Oct 28 2014 running on XQuartz 2.7.11 on MacOS Mojave 10.14.6. It is 
> running without any issue.

> On a older MacBookPro 2010, but always in use, I  have installed same 
> gnubg Version GNU Backgammon 1.04.000  Oct 28 2014 running on XQuartz 
> 2.7.11 on MacOS High Sierra 10.13.6.

> For an unknown reason, whenever I played against the software, It ends 
> up after a couple of moves by freezing for some unknown reason.

> Any clue ? Do you need me to extract some log and if yes which one and 
> then to post it ?

It's difficult to give useful answers without being able to reproduce 
the issue (I don't have a Mac) but here are a few ideas ;

- Do you use the tutor mode ? It uses multiples threads and this is the 
kind of thing that may cause a freeze when broken (note that what you 
installed was built on an earlier version of MacOS, there may have been 
backward compatibility issues in 10.13 that were no longer present in 
10.14, or bugs in gnubg 1.04 that depend on the OS version)

- Does you older Mac has significantly less memoey than the other one ? 
A problem there would probably cause a crash rather than a freeze but 
you may want to look at the value of Settings/Other/Cache. The default 
value is a few 10s of MB ; it may have been raised to a few 100s of MB. 
If this is the case and the machine has 2GB of memory or less you could 
decrease the cache size and see if it makes a difference.

Regarding obtaining a log, maybe a Mac user could give a hint or explain 
how to get a stack dump when aborting a program to (maybe) see where it 
was stuck.