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

In 9.1.104.1 we get regular crashes (me and the other OTT on the project; we haven’t transitioned MTTs to 9 yet, waiting for better stability and line-break issues to be resolved).

The crashes increase markedly when we’re using Zoom’s screen share function. (One of us OTTs is in-country, the other in the States, and we regularly have team meetings to review material in Paratext via Zoom.) In a single morning of work in PT 9.1 via Zoom with screen sharing, we’ll often have 3 crashes, about one an hour. Normal work in PT 9.1 (no Zoom) yields only about 1 crash a day, sometimes none.

I’ll try to start looking at Event Viewer when it happens, and if I get anything in the log, I’ll pass it on via Give Feedback in PT.

Comments

@viverechristus, hopefully the latest fixes have helped.

Have you considered using Paratext Live for these sessions, instead of Zoom screen sharing? If you don’t know, Paratext Live offers Google Doc like editing features where users can see updates as they are entered into the project.

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Thanks, @james_post. Yes, we tried using Paratext Live about a year ago, but we ended up with a bit of a mess (merge problems as I recall), perhaps connected to internet blips. We decided at that time it would be better to assign editing to a single person, with others looking on locally, or via screen share remotely.

Since the latest update, we haven’t had problems with crashing.

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It is possible to use Paratext Live, and have an agreement with everyone that only one person will edit the text. And if some one else has a brilliant idea they want to show everyone they can ask for temporary permission to edit the text. Even working with Google Docs or Google Sheets require a certain amount of “etiquette” or the software will not be able to keep up with the changes. Having such ground rules made it possible for us to use Paratext Live in our team.

Answer 2

We have developed a fix we’re pretty sure should fix the problem. It’s currently out to pre-release users as 9.1.104.39. We hope to have it out to everyone soon.

EDIT: If someone can confirm/deny that the crashes are fixed in that version, that would be great.

Answer 3

Glad to know the fix is in 104.39 I have .39 and am not crashing, but I did not notice that as a problem before. My concern is that PT seems to be very slowly on my machine (Core i7 2.7 Ghz 16 GB RAM). I was wondering if that was due to the fix.

Comments

CrazyRocky:

I was wondering if that was due to the fix.

It is possible, yes. Could you give a more exact description of what’s slower? Like doing X takes longer?

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My version 104.39 shut down suddenly today while it was waiting for the server at a S/R. The problem may be less frequent compared to before, but not completely solved.

Iver+Larsen

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If you have 9.1.104.39 and you get a sudden shutdown, could you please follow the instructions here so we can take a look at it? We’re desperate to track these down as we can’t reproduce them ourselves since we don’t use the application as much as our users do.

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Paratext seems to be OK now for me. So the issue was probably something on my computer, which by the way is brand new. I was wondering if it might have had something to do with the garbage collection issue.
Another interesting issue Is happening to me regularly now: When I start Paratext, I get a warning that Paratext is already . When I open Task manager I see that Paratext has left an backgound process. This happened to me this morning after shutting down Paratext last night and then starting it up.
Not sure if this is important and really how to report it if it is.
Just shut down PT and see PT is still as a process but not as an App:

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CrazyRocky:

Paratext seems to be OK now for me. So the issue was probably something on my computer, which by the way is brand new. I was wondering if it might have had something to do with the garbage collection issue.
Another interesting issue Is happening to me regularly now: When I start Paratext, I get a warning that Paratext is already . When I open Task manager I see that Paratext has left an backgound process. This happened to me this morning after shutting down Paratext last night and then starting it up.
Not sure if this is important and really how to report it if it is.
Just shut down PT and see PT is still as a process but not as an App:

I reported this for Linux v. 9.0 back in Nov. 2020 (Providing information about Paratext 9 memory usage). Basically, memory usage balloons after a couple of hours of use, at which PT becomes unbearably sluggish, which requires a restart, but the PT process doesn’t end when the program is exited, requiring me to kill the process before restarting PT (in this state, the hanging PT process pegs at 25% CPU usage, effectively using one whole core). Oh, and I have to shut down and restart FLEx, too, because if I don’t PT won’t “find” it and looking up words in the associated FLEx project doesn’t work… I’m an i5 machine with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD. All my other programs run fine and don’t hog memory like PT does. I can work around it, but a fix would be awesome!

Answer 4

So far I think the crashing has stopped since getting 104.39, and I haven’t noticed performance issues, but I will update this if I notice any.

Answer 5

I just got a report from a consultant in a rural town that she and two of the translators on the team are getting fairly frequent shut-downs of Paratext, all on different versions: 9.1.104.1, 9.0.103, 9.0.100. She said that today they each had Paratext shut down 2 times. They’ve only ever lost the last couple of words they typed, and she said that Paratext starts right up again, and they can continue where they left off.

I believe the consultant didn’t have the shutdown problem when she was here in the capital city, where she would have been (in most cases) connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, where she is now, it may be difficult for them to get the 62Mb patch file to 104.39.

Comments

@jeffh: if this consultant has the ability to download updates from the website in the capital city, they may be able to take the updates with them to the remote areas. They could download the offline update and latest patch from https://paratext.org/download, take it out to the village, and have everybody update to the latest version.

I suggest this because the goal for every patch is that Paratext will run better than the previous versions/patches.

Answer 6

Sounds like a good plan.

Glad you haven’t hard crashing problems since that latest update. That’s awesome!