[Noisebridge-discuss] dreamweaver on older macbook hangs, then prevents shutdown

[Jonathan Lassoff]

Encapsulated within <49934AE2.60609 at gmail.com> on Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 02:02:10PM -0800, Michael Shiloh <michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Michael Shiloh <michaelshiloh1010 at gmail.com>
> To: "noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net" <noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net>
> Subject: [Noisebridge-discuss] dreamweaver on older macbook hangs,
> 	then prevents shutdown
> X-BeenThere: noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net
> X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5
> 
> i'm a linux guy, but my girlfriend is a mac user (artist, graphic 
> designer, etc.)
> 
> sometimes dreamweaver hangs. sometimes this occurs while pasting text, 
> sometimes when opening a file, sometimes even while being invoked.
> 
> after waiting a long time, she tries to reboot, but shutting down fails 
> because dreamweaver doesn't respond to the quit command. force quit 
> (command-option-escape) sometimes doesn't respond (at least in the 
> seemingly long time we waited) either.
> 
> so i'm trying to understand this from a linux perspective. i'm guessing 
> that dreamweaver is hanging because it can't get enough memory, and i'm 
> guessing it's asking for a lot of memory because it's trying to open a 
> file that may be corrupted or otherwise much larger than it should be. 
> all of our dreamweaver files are pretty trivial: a page of text, a 
> couple of small pictures.
> 
> if i were on linux, i'd ask what files is dreamweaver trying to open 
> before i even tell it to open a file. for instance, if openoffice was 
> killed and left a damaged file, the next time openoffice is invoked it 
> will try to repair the damaged file, whether that's the file that is 
> opened or not. does dreamweaver have such a feature? does it always try 
> to open the last file? most importantly, where does it store this 
> information? is there some way to see what file it's trying to open, so 
> that we can inspect that file to see if it's much bigger than it should be?

I guess it depends on how dirty you want to get with the internals of Dreamweaver and Darwin, but if you're looking for a good picture of what's going on, you might try intercepting all the calls the actual binary is making and see if it's stuck trying to get a descriptor on a non-existant file or something.

When you open an app on OSX, those .app things are actually folders internally, and there is another file inside of there (likely under Contents/MacOS/[appname]) that is the actual binary. Combine this with a system tool called 'kdump', which is somewhat like 'strace' only *BSD.

To use, prefix your normal command with 'ktrace' - this saves a file called 'ktrace.out' in your working directory. This is meant to be decoded by another utility called 'kdump'. An example debugging session might be like:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ ktrace /Applications/Dreamweaver.app/Contents/MacOS/Dreamweaver
[...wait here as all hell breaks loose...]

 Ctrl-C or kill the PID

$ kdump | less
[...page through and look for something interesting. Start with a glance at the bottom to see what was logged last...]

I wish you both luck in improving your systems!

Cheers,
jonathan

> 
> if i were on linux, i might do a find of all dreamweaver files, looking 
> for one that is much bigger than the others.
> 
> if i were on linux, i'd run "top" to see how much cpu time and memory 
> dreamweaver is consuming.
> 
> if i were on linux, i'd not be using dreamweaver in the first place.
> 
> perhaps dreamweaver is not the problem, but only the program that 
> triggers it.
> 
> any suggestions?
> 
> computer is a powerbook g3 with 512 mBytes. (don't tell my girlfriend i 
> told you - she's ashamed of her prehistoric computer. we're going to 
> donate it to the computer history museum once we get rich teaching inner 
> city kids how to make LEDs blink.)
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