Under MacOS if a program locks up the system shows a revolving beach ball when the app has focus or if a program crashes functionality will be lost and related visual references, such as menu bar icons or dialogs will just disappear.
In both cases it is possible to retrieve a crash or spin log that should be sent to us (support@touch-base.com) to help with our investigations into the issue along with any information needed to help reproduce the problem.
Crashes
If a crash occurs, or is thought to have occurred, with one of our components, be it the driver or an add-on component such as the UPDD Daemon, Commander extensions then the system may create a crash log located in one of two areas, depending on a user or system component crash:
User component crash (UPDD Daemon, UPDD Calibration, UPDD Commander etc)
If this is the case there should be a crash log located in the user-level library folder (hence the ~ character) at the following path:
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports
It will include the name of the crashing component, such as: "UPDD Commander_[timestamp]_[computer name].crash” as per the example below or [app name]_[timestamp].ips (macOS 12 and above):
System component crash (driver)
If this is the case there should be a crash log located in the system level library folder at the following path:
/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports
It will include the name of the crashing component, such as: "updd_[timestamp]_[computer name].crash” or [app name]_[timestamp].ips (macOS 12 and above):
Depending on the OS version in use the ‘Library’ folder may be hidden by default. To locate the Library folder, choose 'Go to Folder' from Finder’s 'Go' menu and type:
~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ or /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/
If the library folder is hidden and should you wish to make it permanently visible type the following command in Terminal:
e.g. chflags nohidden ~/Library – this works for in Mac OSX Lion – it may be slight different for other OS versions.
Lockups
When the beach ball is displayed when focusing on a menu bar icon or application dialog then the application has locked up. Sometimes a lock up may force the application to eventually crash in which case a crash log as described above will be created. In other cases the beach ball will remain until you manually Force Quit the program:
A locked up program will be listed in red text in the list of programs.
However, prior to forcing the program to quit you can take a 'spin log' that will help identify the position within the program that has caused the failure. To do this highlight the locked program in the Activity Monitor, it will be listed in red text as (Not Responding). In this instance you can run 'Sample Process' and 'Run Spindump' and send us the output/log from both requests. The spin log will be found in one of the Library folders with the suffix .spin:
Sample request
Occasionally it may be appropriate to take a sample request to try and capture a specific application process, such as excessive CPU usage.
In this case you may wish for the sample to be taken over a period of time.
This can be achieved by starting a sample request from the command line and specify how long it should last using a command in the form:
sample "process name" 30 -f ~/Desktop/updd_sample_filename.txt
For example:
sample "UPDD Daemon" 30 -f ~/Desktop/updd_daemon_sample.txt
sample "UPDD Commander" 30 -f ~/Desktop/updd_commander_sample.txt
sample "updd" 30 -f ~/Desktop/updd_sample.txt
The second parameter is the number of seconds to take the sample for, so this example the command will sample for 30 seconds and save the file to the desktop.
Its possible there's more than one UPDD process with the same name if there are multiple accounts logged in at the same time. However, the sample command will pick the process for the current user which is the required sample.