Paratext 9 suddenly shutting down

Question

I have received several reports of Paratext 9 suddenly shutting down. Is that a known problem? If so, does anybody have a solution to it?

Answer 1

The crash for one person occurs when just reading text and not manipulating anything. This is how the dev team responded:

This information aligns with what we currently know about this problem, and where our efforts towards fixing this are currently focused.

We are dealing with a conflict between two different garbage collectors, one from .Net and one from Gecko/Firefox. In the past we have made isolated improvements to deconflict garbage collection in specific areas of the code. This helped, but was not sufficient. Now we are about to begin testing a more holistic remedy to this problem. The Gecko garbage collector is going to be disabled until the Paratext UI has gone idle for a small length of time. During the idle cycles we will allow the Gecko garbage collector to run. It has required a new version of Gecko in order to make this work. So now we are going to work on testing this improvement and a determination will be forthcoming.

For the record, I have had to recommend that several people with significant issues revert to Paratext 8 until the problem is resolved. Of course, if you are not one of those relatively few who are affected, you can continue in 9.1 with no problem.

Comments

Any update to when a fix will be available? I understand it will first be available in a pre-release version.
Is it possible this conflict is also causing PT to run significantly slower, instead of crashing, in some cases?

Answer 2

I have seen Paratext 9.0.100.6 close down when I opened the localization tool. It would help if you could identify which specific version(s) is having the problem and what the user was doing when it shut down.

Comments

PT 9.0.100.5 shut down suddenly on me once yesterday. I was just editing in a verse in our project. When I restarted the program it told me there might be some unsaved material, or something to that effect.

I haven’t seen anything like this for a while. It used to happen occasionally as an anti-virus issue but hasn’t for a while.

Jan+Gossner

Answer 3

I have reported crashes when the laptop suddenly loses WIFI. We were in an environment for a group training where wifi was bad, and one model of laptop kept dropping WiFi. When it did PT9 would crash. They changed locations, the WiFi is stable and the crashes stopped.

Answer 4

Most of these types of crashes where Paratext just disappears should be fixed in 9.0.100.9 (currently to pre-release users). Due to a bug, the normal crash-handling inside of Paratext was not getting used in some circumstances, so Paratext would just disappear instead of sending in an exception report.

Comments

My wife has seen these crashes several times both in Paratext 9.0.100.5, 9.0.100.9, 9.0.100.10, and 9.0.100.16. We have not been able to identify any reason for them yet. Sometimes it even happens when Paratext is just in the background. Another user found these crashes so annoying that he decided to go back to Paratext 8.

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Just FYI, I’m still experiencing unexplained shutdowns. [Phone Removed]Every couple weeks this happens, and almost every single time I’m interacting with notes (usually filtering them to look for a specific note). Today when it did this I was in the middle of typing a note. Fortunately, nothing was lost other than the note I was working on. As far as I can tell, no kind of crash report is generated.

Answer 5

Can you look in your Windows Event Viewer > Windows Logs > Application, select any errors that are caused by Paratext and/or .Net, right-click on them, click Save Selected Events and send that file to [Email Removed]?

Comments

Where would I find something similar for Linux? I’ve got random, unexplained shutdowns happening as well… (with a window saying, “you might have lost recent changes; check the window that opens, etc.” [but no window opens…]).

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After months of no mysterious sudden shut downs by Paratext 9, my wife and I both had Paratext 9 just suddenly close while working. Any closer on a solution to this problem?

Answer 6

A solution has been found, but it was fairly extensive and did not make it into 9.0. The fix will be in 9.1 (which should be released in the next week, hopefully).

Comments

It will never go into 9.0?

Answer 7

The fix required significant changes to the way some of the back-end systems worked and would risk destabilizing 9.0, so the changes were done in 9.1. I won’t say “never”, but there are currently no plans to backport the changes to 9.0.

Answer 8

I’m still experiencing unexpected shut downs (version 9.1.104.1). Usually, but not always, when I’m typing a note. The frequency seems a little less than in 9.0, but not by much.

Comments

We haven’t found a way to cure all of these crashes - it’s a memory issue between our Firefox based HTML control and .Net.

In Paratext 9.1, we have a way to fix specific instances that we find, but we need details from a crash to do this.

If Paratext crashes, do the following:

1. Click the Windows icon and type: Event Viewer (you may see it as an option before you are finished typing)

2. In the left pane, click on Windows Logs and then Application

3. You should see some Error entries near the top of the log that have Paratext or .Net Framework as the Source.

4. Copy the text of the messages and include it in a problem report.

I know that sometimes there are no Paratext or .Net entries in the Event Viewer and I’m not sure how to get further details from crashes like that.

John+Wickberg
Paratext Support

Answer 9

Just happened again about 10 minutes ago. Paratext shut down when I typed a forward slash (\). No errors in the Application log. The only thing I could find at about that time was gupdate, and it wasn’t an error or warning.

Comments

My Paratext 9.1 also shuts down once in a while for no apparent reason. It is not caused by typing anything, but sometimes when I switch to a different application. Paratext suddenly shuts down in the background. I could not find any relevant information in the log file.
Iver+Larsen

Answer 10

Several of my MTTs just reported the same thing: Paratext 9.1 ( on Windows 10) shutting down for no apparent reason.