Mac OS11 Big Sur eats RAM and hangs CPU with Qt apps

Continuing the discussion from 20200914 Weekly Release:

Hi! Welcome to the Seamly forums!

Considering that Big Sur was released to the public less than a week ago, I don’t think our devs have been able to look into it very deeply yet. @slspencer could tell us more.

Which release date was it that you tried installing? The mid-September release that you posted on, or the mid-October release that is linked on the home page?

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That makes sense. I’m new to this forum so I’m not exactly sure where to find everything but if I’m not mistaken, I actually installed a release from July.

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I’m assuming that the download link on the front page, seamly.net, got updated recently then. If you want to try the latest weekly releases, they can be found at: Releases · FashionFreedom/Seamly2D · GitHub. There have been a few lovely improvements since July, & maybe more recent updates might even work with Big Sur!

I can’t really speak for the devs, but I think they would appreciate the part of your system log relating to trying to load Seamly2D, (it could be found in the Utility “Console” back in Tiger, IIRC. Maybe it still is?)

Once again, we’re happy to have you here!

:unicorn:

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Speaking of which… I just pushed changes for the Variables and History dialogs that Aline has confirmed fixes the issue of crashes on a Mac (w/ Catalina) when the Esc key or Close button is pressed. I would expect the changes to appear in a weekly update soon. Would be interested to know if it will work with Big Sur.

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Ok I just downloaded the latest release from 11-30 but it still doesn’t work. It downloads and it looks like it tries to open the application but then nothing happens. In my dock it looks as though the app is running but there are no windows showing the apps.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what all the Utility console stuff is lol, sorry :-/

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:frowning_face_with_open_mouth:

So sad to hear that it’s still not working! The only thing I could find online that might possibly help is to uninstall & re-install Seamly.

As for the Console: In the Applications folder there should be a folder labeled “Utilities”. In the Utilities folder should be an application labeled “Console”

Here’s an article I found on the 'web about how to use the Console.

& here’s the official Apple page about the Console.

If you’re interested. I know poking around behind closed doors isn’t for everybody! :grin:

:unicorn:

Thank you, I will try and check on that tomorrow. In the meantime, this may be useful information, I’m not sure… but when I went to open another program after trying to open seamly I couldn’t because a window popped up showing that I had run out of application memory. I have 16 GB of ram, and nearly half was being taken up by seamly, so I think it was trying to run in the background but didn’t have enough memory. I had about 5 other programs open at the time but between all of them they took up less than 1 GB, while seamly was using up the rest.

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I’m sorry I’m at a disadvantage as I have no access to a Mac, far less Big Sur.

Here’s a question… have you tried running any other apps built with Qt? In other words, maybe we can determine if the problem is in Qt or Seamly.

Seamly shouldn’t take that much mem to run… if I had to guess I’d say there could be a memory leak eating up the mem. Again, the question is whether it’s in Qt or Seamly.

EDIT: Doing a little research I’m seeing others experiencing (Py) apps running, but no windows showing. Sounds like a Qt issue. That’s always the risk with a new OS… bugs are bound to exist.

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Yes, I looked up the problem. Based on the reports, what’s happening to others with other Qt based apps, it seems that’s where the problems lies. What they describe is exactly what’s happening on my end. I’m not a developer, so this doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, but I’m sure developers here do, so just linking this for reference: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-87014

Also, this:

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Thanks @kaldrea, the tip from the second link to set QT_MAC_WANTS_LAYER=1 works. Though as you’re not a developer I doubt this is useful, but hopefully the Seamly devs can integrate this fix :slight_smile:

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Thank you so much @sitharus!!!
Here’s the github issue about this problem in Qt. This is definitely a simple fix!:

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Unfortunately the problem is still not fixed with today’s update. Have you already decided when you will be able to work with Big Sur again?

At the moment I have to work with my old Mac, which is unfortunately not as nice as the big iMac.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how and where to integrate the tip recommended here, because I’m not a programmer.

I had hoped that today’s update would help. :frowning:

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OK we’ll try to address this bug this week. We won’t know if it works until next Monday’s build.

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@Douglas Should we make this change in def.cpp as a new function?

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I submitted a PR today. Can’t test it as I don’t have a MAC. It builds and runs with Qt 5.13.2 on Windows 10 using QtCreator and MinGW.

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Here’s the build for the BigSur fix. I don’t have a Mac, so @kaldrea please test it!

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It doesn’t seem to make a difference to me, the app still hangs on open.

I’ll see if I can get the Qt developer tools installed on my machine - I’ve never used Qt before but I’m familiar with Mac development. I’ve been planning on it but haven’t had time.

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Unfortunately, the new update still doesn’t work. :-/

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:cry: Ok I will keep working on this.

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The new update still doesn’t work.