SL Viewer Freeze and Crash, relog tells me the region is losing out and to try again in 5 minutes.

[Rolig Loon]

This part >>> " relog tells me the region is logging out and to try again in 5 minutes."  is perfectly normal. All that means is that the servers are still busy trying to recover all the pieces from when you crashed.  They can't let you log in again until they have finished completely logging you out.

That's one wierd crash, though.  It looks very much like a graphics card failure, or at least a wonky set of graphics drivers.  Our resident Mac expert, Maddy, will be along here shortly, so she may have more specific ideas.  I would suggest, at the least, updating your drivers to see if that makes a difference.

[Rolig Loon]

This part >>> " relog tells me the region is logging out and to try again in 5 minutes."  is perfectly normal. All that means is that the servers are still busy trying to recover all the pieces from when you crashed.  They can't let you log in again until they have finished completely logging you out.

That's one wierd crash, though.  It looks very much like a graphics card failure, or at least a wonky set of graphics drivers.  Our resident Mac expert, Maddy, will be along here shortly, so she may have more specific ideas.  I would suggest, at the least, updating your drivers to see if that makes a difference.

[Madelaine McMasters]

Rolig's right, that is a weird crash. If it doesn't happen once your region is back up, I suppose I'd write it off to a viewer glitch in handling offline regions. If it persists, try a different viewer. I always keep two on my Mac to help isolate problems. If the alternate viewer works, it may be time for a clean install. If the alternate viewer has the same problem, I'm stumped.

My experience with SL Viewer crashes is that they happen when the GPU is overloaded. Mac OS first spools up the fans (which I rarely hear running when I'm in SL), and then starts throttling the GPU clock to maintain safe temperature. Eventually the GPU slows to the point where the viewer crashes. If your iMac was quiet at the time it crashed, it's unlikely to be a GPU overload.

Good luck, David!

[sven Homewood]

Mac's you can't update drivers like you do in Windows or Linux. All you get via the update are minor fixes for security issues. A new version of drivers comes only with a new OS and s/she seems to have the latest.

[sven Homewood]

This report of your issue seems to be ralated to the issue of a user that uses the Alchemy viewer. Even it doesn't provide an answer, it might help to track down the issue. Here's the link to their Jira: https://alchemy.atlassian.net/browse/ALCH-332?filter=10300

EDIT: I did dig some more in the SL Jira and found this: Nivida seems to provide updates of thier driver for the more recent Mac OS versions now. Here the link about the SL Jira and the solution of their find: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10302

[Madelaine McMasters]

Yep, driver updates of all kinds come with each OS update, and you don't know it's happening. You just get an OS update and that's it. Rolig, I nominate Sven as "Resident Mac Expert".

;-).

[sven Homewood]

After digging the SL Jira i learned, that nvidia has some drivers on their site. So my knowledge seems to be outdated or incomplete...

[Madelaine McMasters]

Well, your knowledge is more up-to-date and complete than mine!

[Rolig Loon]

Aha! I thought I remembered someone saying that you could update drivers for a Mac -- it wasn't you, Maddy? -- but Macs are another world for me. That's why I pseudo-ducked.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I wasn't aware that NVIDIA had Mac graphics drivers, only that they had CUDA drivers for parallel processing apps. Apple uses OpenCL for parallel computing, not CUDA. I did a bit of searching and find that they do actually have a set of graphics drivers for use by Mac owners. There is some conflict in the NVIDIA documentation concerning eligible Mac models. On the download page they state that some iMacs and laptops are compatible, but on the "Additional Information" page they say the driver is only compatible with old Mac Pro towers that can accept GPU cards (which makes sense, as Apple wouldn't release drivers for hardware they never shipped).

They have no driver package for the current version of Mac OS, and I was unable to install it on an iMac that's listed as compatible on the website, getting a message saying my iMac isn't compatible.

It's not clear to me that the NVIDIA supplied drivers are any newer than those included in Apple releases. There might be some small window of time during which NVIDIAs drivers might be newer than those built in to Mac OS. They seem more targeted to older systems with aftermarket graphics cards, including the "Hackintosh" community that builds Mac clones from standard PC hardware.

It seems this stuff isn't for mainstream, or even reasonably sophisticated (Me?) users.