I still get a crash code, once in a while (some days it’s up to 4 a day). Is there a way for me to read and understand the crash codes? I just need a pointer to the cause of the crash, such as a buggy extension (that I can disable or remove) or an old driver, or maybe just a setting in my CPU or GPU? anything would help! Thanks!
If you mean the number that shows when you get a BugSplat window, I understand that it is just a running number, with no deeper meanings. If you send them with your e-mail attached, the SketchUp team can look the error report up and perhaps determine the cause. @colin here has that ability.
Thanks for sending in 114 bugsplats.
For the ones that happened during startup, those sometimes can be caused by a particular extension. In your case the crashes happened when different extensions were loading, so no one extension to blame.
For crashes that happened a long time after you had been working, it may be that the last action you did used an extension, or that it involved part of the model that has problems.
What would help in those cases is if there was a particular model that when you did the same action, then caused SketchUp to crash, it should be reproducible, so the issue can be tracked down.
We do fix quite a lot of things. If you don’t notice a particular set of actions or models that always lead to a crash, best you can do is try the next update when it is released, and see if the crashes you were getting have been fixed.
The numbers are not codes, they are database record numbers.
Also it helps to enter a description of what you were doing and with what (native tool or extension) in the box on the BugSplat form.
Thanks @Anssi , I mean is there a way, for me to read the crash report and understand its content.
Thanks @DanRathbun , what I mean is, before sending the report, there is an option to read a few files (the crash reports I guess). I did open a few of them in the past and didn’t have the knowledge to understand what I was looking at. My question should have been: how can I learn to understand these reports. Next crash I will take a few screen shots and post what I’m talking about.
Thank you all for looking into it!
Will do, thanks @colin !
There is a bugsplat report generated in the windows temp files - you can read the log there
Thanks @Elmtec-Adam , I did figure that out but didn’t really made sense of what I was looking at and was wondering if there is a way to learn to read and understand the info in these files.
The crash logs are mostly unintelligible to anyone but experienced developers. And even then without source code it can be effectively impossible to figure out what the program was trying to do when it crashed. Also, it may be possible to determine that SketchUp crashed in Ruby, but not which extension(s) were responsible.
Here’s a very au-courant idea: why not try asking an AI to interpret the crash log. It should be interesting to see what it comes up with!
The one I look at is the SketchUpLog one. That shows a list of the actions that have happened, and usually the last entry is what you were doing at the time of the crash. In the case of crashes on startup, you should be able to see what extension was initializing at the time of the crash.
You could enroll at UCF for a degree in Computer Science, because there is no secret decoder ring. Even if you can see that there was a memory fault in sketchup.exe it will not help you avoid the issue, unless you remember what it is that you did when the crash happend.
Listen, I myself am a programmer. But I do NOT bother trying to read any of these crash files. Without the pdb symbol files and the application source code the files would not help me much. SketchUp products are not open source, they are proprietary.
The most you might be able to do is notice what library file the problem occurred in and if it is say a device driver, update the file from the device manufacturer’s website. (Users often have crashes in graphics card or 3D mouse drivers.)
But as said, if the issue is within sketchup.exe or or one of it’s library files, there is nothing to do but send in the report and let the Trimblers worry about it.
Thank you @colin . This is EXACTLY what I was trying to understand. Thank you so much!
Thanks @DanRathbun - As I tried to explain (probably poorly) in my previous post, I was just trying to see if something flagged on the crash report, such as an extension, an old driver or a bad setting. I am not pretending to know anything about computers but I like to troubleshoot things myself in case there is a simple fix. If nothing seems to make sense to me, I definetly ask the people who know, to help (hence my post at the first place).
Thank you for your explanations and trying to help!
It’s a list of things that happen - the things at the bottom are the last things before it crashed usually
Thanks @Elmtec-Adam !
It would make more sense for non-geeky users if an AI agent examined the logs after you send them in, and then displayed something useful in the browser along with the dB crash number. (This has been requested previously.)
Being inside at Trimble, that AI could even be trained on the source code and resolved Bugsplats to provide faster, better answers and potentially point the devs at what to fix!