[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #56270] Octave 5.1.0 is freeze-y/hang-y on macOS

[Andrew Janke]

URL:
  <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?56270>

                 Summary: Octave 5.1.0 is freeze-y/hang-y on macOS
                 Project: GNU Octave
            Submitted by: apjanke
            Submitted on: Sun 05 May 2019 05:47:00 PM EDT
                Category: GUI
                Severity: 3 - Normal
                Priority: 5 - Normal
              Item Group: Segfault, Bus Error, etc.
                  Status: None
             Assigned to: None
         Originator Name: 
        Originator Email: 
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                 Release: 5.1.0
        Operating System: Mac OS

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Details:

Hi, Octave folks,

I think this has been discussed before, but I'm posting an issue for it to
have a central place to track this problem.

It seems that the Octave 5.1.0 release has some serious stability issues when
running in GUI mode on macOS. The GUI freezes (locks up/hangs) a lot.
Sometimes immediately on startup, sometimes a couple seconds after that,
sometimes later on when running code. When this happens, the Octave GUI
becomes completely unresponsive, you get a "spinnning rainbow beachball"
cursor, and you have to Force Kill or `kill -9` the octave process to get it
to go away. (Sometimes it hangs so hard even that doesn't work, and I have to
log out and back in to get the Octave window to go away. That's a surprise.)

Sebastian Schoeps and I have observed this with Octave.app, and I've also seen
this with vanilla Mac Homebrew installations and MacPorts installations. I
don't think it's specific to the packaging.

We haven't seen this problem with Octave 4.4.1.

One of the differences between our 4.4.1 and 5.1.0 builds is that 4.4.1 was
with Qt 5.11 and 5.1.0 is with Qt 5.12. So I've tried building 5.1.0 with Qt
5.11. Anecdotally, that seems to improve things, but they're still bad: Octave
5.1.0 with Qt 5.11 will hang a lot during usage.

I don't want to be a complainer here: I recognize all the good work that
you're doing, and that this is affecting a minority of users. But it seems
that Octave 5.x in GUI mode is kind of unusable on the Mac right now. It's bad
enough that Octave.app is not releasing a 5.1.0 build yet, and we're
considering doing a CLI-only release for 5.1.

Hope we can figure out a solution here.





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