• Freeze

What is a freeze?

A "freeze" or "hang" is the state of the program when it does not respond to the operating system. A situation when ArchiCAD does not respond to user actions (You see the hourglass on PC or the beachball on Mac ) does not necessarily mean its frozen, it might just be busy. In a "busy" state, you might not be able to interact with ArchiCAD, but ArchiCAD still responds to events initiated by the operating system. When ArchiCAD is frozen, it does not even respond to system events.

How to Report a Freeze on Vista or Windows 7

Open the task manager and right click on the ArchiCAD instance that has frozen. Create a dump file. Developers at Graphisoft can investigate the data written in the dump file. Unfortunately, the dump file is only human readable with the assistance of a debugger and the symbol tables that are created when ArchiCAD is compiled. Unfortunately this function doesn't work on Windows XP.

How to Report a Freeze on PCs in general

For freezes this is a neat trick with the two tools. (see also the screenshots I have enclosed).

With process explorer:

1. Use process explorer (Free tool; Part of the Sysinternals suite of programs http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx )

2. Choose the ArchiCAD process
3. Right click on it; then choose properties and then choose the threads tab
4. The thread that looks suspicious (high CPU usage) choose a stack and send a screen shot of it

With process dump

1. Run procdump from the command prompt about three time with a new dump file name each run, separated by about 10 seconds each. (also part of Sysinternals)
2. procdump -64 PID_of_ArchiCAD nameofdumpfile.dmp

Three process dumps are more helpful to the developers than just one. Often the value of the dump is a question of timing; a dump may present more useful information at one time than another. With three dumps the developer can compare the instructions that are being run by the CPU. This time averaged view often gives better insights into the cause of the race or lock.

How to Report a Freeze on Mac

To investigate a Freeze on Mac, please provide the following data to your ArchiCAD reseller's tech support:

• Your description of the problem (how frequent does this happen? What were you doing before it happened?)
• 3-4 process samples (see below)
• a hang log (see below)

Process sample

While ArchiCAD is frozen, open the Activity monitor, select the ArchiCAD process, and click the Sample Process icon. This will take a few second sample from ArchiCAD, and will display it in text format. Click Save to save this in a txt file. Please repeat the process and create at least 3-4 samples.

hang log

When you are finished with taking the sample, pleas force-quit ArchiCAD. This should open up the Mac reporter (Note: this is not ArchiCAD's GSReporter with the ladybug icon). If the Mac reporter does not appear then ArchiCAD was not frozen from a technical point of view - it was just busy.

Click Report... then on the appearing window select the Problem details tab. Copy the text from here, and paste it into a text file.

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Known freeze causes

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