Re: [Gimp-user] GIMP crashes intermittently & often

[Gary Aitken <gimp dreamchaser org>]

Hi Dave,

> What do you mean by "bringing an open Excel window into focus to
> enter data obtained from GIMP"?

You clarified in step 3 below.
 
> We are using GIMP to calculate some values and then manually entering
> the data in Excel. Steps:
> 1. Excel is active
> 2. GIMP is active - make measurements and note them down
> 3 Click on the Excel window so that it gets focus- i.e. it comes to the front
> so that you can enter data 
> 4. Message pops up "GIMP has encountered a problem and must close"
>
> So GIMP has not been idle, nor is it on the other machine when it
> crashes The machines have a lot of free disk space - 3 Terabytes on
> Machine #1, about 1 Terabyte on Machine #2 Memory is managed by
> Windows

Wow, that is really bizarre.
What is the file type of the image being viewed?  
Does it still crash if you use an image of a different type?
Is the image being edited located on the system on which gimp is executing,
or is it located on a shared file system on a different machine?
If you go to edit/preferences/folders, what are the temporary folder and
the swap folder values, and are those located on the same machine on which
gimp is executing?
What happens if you do the measurement and instead of clicking on another
application, just wait a minute or two?  Can you perform another operation
in gimp under those conditions without it crashing?  For example, measure
something else in the same image?

If you run the taskmgr and view the performance tab, does anything grow
like crazy and saturate at a high value when it's in the process of crashing,
then go back down to more normal values?  If it does, can you tell which process 
(probably gimp, but you never know...) is consuming the resource?

> The error log on machine #2 shows the following:
> Faulting application name: gimp-2.8.exe, version: 2.8.14.0, time stamp: 0x00000000 
> Faulting module name: libcairo-2.dll, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0xa340a328
> Exception code: 0xc0000005
> Fault offset: 0x00000000000235b4
> Faulting process id: 0x1344
> Faulting application start time: 0x01d03e91dbe5d19d
> Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin\gimp-2.8.exe
> Faulting module path: C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\bin\libcairo-2.dll
> Report Id: df6c9434-ab43-11e4-8279-002590c1ee4d

I'm fishing with the above questions to try to figure out why it would be
crashing in the cairo library; it's hard to imagine why it would crash there
when gimp loses focus, although I don't know squat about cairo or the
ways gimp uses it.

Do you happen to have a version of the program cairo-trace on your system?
If so, it may be helpful to start gimp using the command
  cairo-trace gimp
cairo-trace creates a file that shows all the operations cairo is performing;
it may be possible to see what it is doing when it fails by examining that 
file.

Gary

> On 02/03/15 19:06, David Scriven wrote:
> > Dear All, I'm using GIMP (2.8.14, downloaded from your site) on
> > two Windows 7 x64 machines (both fully up-to-date). Both have
> > antivirus software and Office 2010 with Word, Powerpoint, Excel,
> > etc. installed and active. On numerous occasions and while GIMP is
> > being used Windows issues the message "GIMP has encountered a
> > problem and must close". This usually occurs when one or more
> > Office 2010 windows are also open. For example, a colleague working
> > on machine (#1, 4 cores, 8 GB memory, HD Intel graphics)  found
> > that bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data
> > obtained from GIMP was sufficient to crash GIMP and cause this
> > message. (this is consistent and has happened many times). This has
> > only just started occurring  - previously the user on machine 1 had
> > used GIMP for the same task without problem (update to Office
> > causing the problem??). I have now encountered the problem on
> > machine #2 (16 cores, 64GB memory, high-end NVIDIA card) using GIMP
> > and Powerpoint simultaneously, although I have not been able to
> > identify a precipitating event that causes this.
> >
> > I have tried increasing the memory available to GIMP in both
> > machines (via Edit/Preferences) but to no avail. The error message
> > is virtually meaningless.  The crashes are frequent enough (about
> > 1 /hour) that is extremely irritating, never mind the loss of time
> > and work. Any ideas? David
>
> What do you mean by
>
> "bringing an open Excel window into focus to enter data obtained from
> GIMP"?
>
> How are you trying to transfer the data (presumably an image) from
> GIMP to Excel?
>
> It sounds like you are not doing anything with GIMP leading up to the
> crash. i.e. it has been sitting idle for some time.  Is that
> correct?
>
> How much swap space (paging file size) does the system have?  Is it
> set to fixed limits, or to "Let Windows Manage My Virtual Memory"?
> How much free disk space is there?
>
> It sounds like you are bumping up against some system resource limit,
> but which one is hard to tell.  Is there anything in the system error
> log?
>
> Gary