Anyone tried Apple MacOS Sierra with SL Viewer yet?

[Gavin Hird]

9 hours ago, Cinder Roxley said:

Also, if there's an "open acknowledged" radar for it, that just goes to show that it's an Apple bug. lol

Be honest, you just really want metal because you have a hardon for Apple marketing, but you want somebody else to do the work for you.

LOL

I have not been in the market for a rendering engineer, preferably with Metal experience. Linden Lab has!

[SavannahBelle1990]

I've been using Firestorm on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2014) since I got the computer almost four years ago. Exactly a week ago I started experiencing a random whole system shut down about two to five minutes into logging in with Firestorm. After several crashes I switched over to the default Second Life viewer and had the same thing happened. 

So a little more information. Things don't necessarily slow down so much, but I did notice my fan kick on just before the shutdown. It isn't just the viewer that crashes, the screen goes black and I have to power up again. It is both Firestorm and the Second Life viewer that cause this issue.

Over the weekend I tried some other viewers and the one that doesn't crash my whole computer seems to be Alchemy. So far so good. It doesn't crash, but my computer's fan is working hard. It is loud. The computer gets hot. Additionally, when more than just a couple people are in the sim, it gets really laggy. Randomly, I downloaded World of Warcraft and started playing that to see if it was a graphics issue. I thought that might be similarly graphically intense as Second Life gets. I had no crashes while playing World of Warcraft for over an hour.

My graphics in Second Life is set to middle/low.

I'd like to get back to using Firestorm. So does anyone have any idea what is going on and what a solution might be?

Thanks!

[Madelaine McMasters]

Savannah, this sounds suspiciously like blocked cooling paths. Many years ago, my 2006 MacBook Pro would crash hard while running SL. As with yours, I could hear the fan(s) spooling up just before the crash. I was able to remove the bottom cover of the computer and discovered that one of the two blowers (the one for the GPU) was jammed by some amazing miniature dust bunnies. Blowing them out with compressed air solved the problem. It won't be so easy to open your more modern MacBook Pro, but it may be possible to clear things out by blowing compressed air into the vents. If you're near an Apple Store, the Genius Bar may be able to help.

Good luck!

[SavannahBelle1990]

1 hour ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

Savannah, this sounds suspiciously like blocked cooling paths. Many years ago, my 2006 MacBook Pro would crash hard while running SL. As with yours, I could hear the fan(s) spooling up just before the crash. I was able to remove the bottom cover of the computer and discovered that one of the two blowers (the one for the GPU) was jammed by some amazing miniature dust bunnies. Blowing them out with compressed air solved the problem. It won't be so easy to open your more modern MacBook Pro, but it may be possible to clear things out by blowing compressed air into the vents. If you're near an Apple Store, the Genius Bar may be able to help.

Good luck!

So I am guessing I don't want to blow from the outside in. Won't that just push dust and debris further inside? I'll do some research, I guess.

[Madelaine McMasters]

21 minutes ago, SavannahBelle1990 said:

So I am guessing I don't want to blow from the outside in. Won't that just push dust and debris further inside? I'll do some research, I guess.

Googling "clean MacBook pro" produced a few videos, as did "blow dust MacBook Pro". It looks like most (all?) of them involved removing the bottom cover, as I did with my old machine years ago. I live in a house with 150psi air lines on every floor, which is handy for cleaning more than notebook computers. You'll probably have to get a can of compressed air, or take your laptop to a place that has tools for the job.

[SavannahBelle1990]

On 6/4/2018 at 10:50 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

Googling "clean MacBook pro" produced a few videos, as did "blow dust MacBook Pro". It looks like most (all?) of them involved removing the bottom cover, as I did with my old machine years ago. I live in a house with 150psi air lines on every floor, which is handy for cleaning more than notebook computers. You'll probably have to get a can of compressed air, or take your laptop to a place that has tools for the job.

I think that did it. I managed to get the dust out of it and I've been on Firestorm for about an hour with any crash. Thanks!

[SavannahBelle1990]

On 6/4/2018 at 10:50 PM, Madelaine McMasters said:

Googling "clean MacBook pro" produced a few videos, as did "blow dust MacBook Pro". It looks like most (all?) of them involved removing the bottom cover, as I did with my old machine years ago. I live in a house with 150psi air lines on every floor, which is handy for cleaning more than notebook computers. You'll probably have to get a can of compressed air, or take your laptop to a place that has tools for the job.

I spoke too soon. I've had a couple more crashes while using Firestorm  Even after cleaning all the dust bunnies out of my MacBook Pro. Same deal as before. My fan gets really loud and then the whole system shuts down. 

I'm hoping it isn't a hard drive issue. However I have backed up all of my files. 

Anyone have any ideas on what is going on or what I can try next?

[Madelaine McMasters]

If your Mac is otherwise working fine, the fan(s) are winding up because MacOS senses rising temperatures in the CPU, GPU, or other subsystem (I know that desktop Macs have hard drive temp sensors). If there is still dust blocking an air passage, the wildly spinning fan won't cool anything. I don't think a failing hard drive could cause the fan(s) to spin up. That, and the SL crashing, still sounds like an overheating GPU to me.

There are programs available for most computers that report sensor data, allowing you to see things like CPU/GPU/disk temperatures.  A bit of Googling found "iStat Menus" from bjango...

https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

I've never heard of that program before, and I don't know what the temperature limits are for Mac internals, so I'm not sure how useful the tool would be.

[SavannahBelle1990]

Thanks, I have Coconut, which tells me my battery temp is between 36.1 with no fan on. I just tried to get the temp when the fan is on and the system shut down. Then I did an Apple System Diagnostic but it revealed no problems.

[SavannahBelle1990]

So the wild ride I've been on the past 24 hours. I spent last night and this morning looking into random MacBook Pro shut downs and found this as a solution...

https://outluch.wixsite.com/rmbp-crash

It outlines that removing a certain Thunderbolt extension will resolve the random shut downs. And it did! I can run both the Second Life default viewer and Firestorm without my system crashing. However it get extremely hot and the fan runs super loud. When Coconut said my battery temperature was 36C I shut down Firestorm.

Before I did so I downloaded iStats and took this snapshot of my system. I am largely ignorant to most of what this means. Does this disclose any ideas to anyone?