Silent crash/quit with no error message on Mac OS

General
1

From time to time I receive reports of customers having my app silently crashing/disappearing with no error message on Mac OS. It is rare but quite puzzling. Today I finally decided to google for it and that is what I found https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6711840?start=0&tstart=0 Now I am even more puzzled… why this? Is it possible to protect my app from Apple?

2

But its an opt IN system as far as I understand
You have to pretty specifically state you are capable

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSProcessInfo_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000316-SW9

It defaults to 1 which means NO

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSProcessInfo_Class/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/20000316-SW3

3

I was just looking at NSProcessInfo, I will have to read more doc :-/ indeed…

4

Right but note that NSProcessInfo explicitly states that t defaults to 1 which means there should be NO sudden app termination

unless you modified the plist to allow it ?

5

I did not modify the plist to allow it actually. There is no ‘NSSupportsSuddenTermination’ entry in it.

6

So my guess is that its NOT this setting doing it
Have any customers got console logs they can peek through and then find your app name ?
Can you reproduce this at all ?
Have seen one mention of the OS shutting down a Xojo app because its burning CPU (google for OS X “burning CPU”)
But that’s not been reproduced here so I’m not sure what was up
Something along these lines http://superuser.com/questions/869773/how-to-solve-burning-cpu-message-in-console in a console log

7

I will ask the last customer is reporting that. I believe I had around 5 cases in the last two months. I have never been able to reproduce. The app just sends emails and use threads.

8

This doesn’t sound like sudden termination or auto termination, AFAIK from reading the docs it is opt-in only.

If you’re using App Wrapper, click on the “action” icon next to “High Resolution (Retina)” and just make sure that Termination Auto and Sudden are switched off.

If you adopt it with your application, it’s actually pretty cool. The OS can kill your application, leaving the dock icon and the windows there, and then re-load it when it needs to. Saving memory and what-not. However you need to really spend time on making your app save and restore it’s state as quickly as possible.

9

I’ve seen some rare framework bugs where the app quits silently due to a Cocoa exception. These are, however, logged in Console.log so you might ask your customer to search in console log around the time of the “crash”.