hi,

Well. very hard to say why with so little informations. I am no expert, but I'm not sure why crashes should be related with cpu usage.

So what are you doing when Max crashs ? Are you patching, playing with patch ? What is your OS ? Max version, etc.

There is a guide here or there for that kind of reports. Maybe have a look at it and try to be as much precise as possible so people can help you.

Julien.

What version? This happened to me yesterday on Windows XP Pro SP2 256M RAM, PIII-700 laptop. Max/MSP full trial version 4.5.6. No peripheral I/O, just LCD, line, number boxes, preset, buddy, etc. The crash (sudden instantaneous exit with no message box) occurred after several hours of editing/saving, adding and removing preset entries. I've tried to replicate the event, but no luck so far today.

I've confirmed there were no message loops. There were two LCDs open at once, and redraws to the 2nd one were _very_ slow compared to the first. - Lex

In my experience as an XP programmer (Max, Visual Basic, whatever), a one-time crash without a clear cause that cannot be reproduced isn't worth worrying about. It could have been anything. That it happened while working in a specific application doesn't necessarily mean anything.

If it happens a second time, then it's something to worry about.

As an example, Outlook crashed on me a day or two ago. It's a very rare occurrence. It would be silly of me to spend time trying to figure out why since it happens so rarely (last time was months ago). And, even though it's Outlook that crashed, I'm pretty sure it was actually Norton Anti-Virus or PC MacLan that was the culprit.

It's good that you're paying attention to what you were doing before it crashed. Providing a detailed series of events leading up to a crash is very important for a developer when sorting out the problem.

I don't think any developer could respond to Bret's problem without more information.

Adam

to further clarify... i use OSx the latest version, max/msp version 4.5.3. what happens is that i am playing a patch with simple groove, random, metro etc. objects, nothing fancy, and not alot of them. max never quits when i am editing, only when playing a patch, but it quits after 20 minutes or so of editing and saving and playing. other than that there isnt much else going on. like i said earlier if i use more plug-ins then it is more likely to quit, but even without it still quits. max quits on me about 80% of the time i use it and i am always doing the same small tasks of playing a simple patch. since it happens so often it makes using max at all very difficult.

i dont know what else to say

thanks

Well, first of all you should update to the most recent version, 4.5.6. Second of all, have you looked in ~/Logs/CrashReporter/ MaxMSP4.5.app.crash.log? There might be some useful info in there for you about the crashing, and possibly for us (support@cycling74.com). Patches which crash under reproducible conditions are also wonderful to have.

Older versions are more or less sure to contain bugs which we've fixed since then -- as a result, we can't offer a lot of support for those versions.

jb