2014-03-20, 23:32
(2014-03-20, 16:00)Memphiz Wrote: diff both guisettings.xmlA unified diff is over half a MB due to tons of skin related crap (yes I've tried lots of skins in the last year and it seems they've all left their settings behind...) and when I've tried to reproduce the problem tonight while making a diff I can't reproduce it.
I have a hunch that it may only occur during low memory conditions, perhaps a graphics buffer allocation failure is triggering it. The reason I suspect that is this Mac only has 1GB ram and it has always been very tight for free memory - after launching XBMC there was only ever about 60MB memory free at most even with Frodo, sometimes dipping down to 30MB or less after playing for a while, it's always been like this.
When I used to run Aeon Nox the skin would sometimes malfunction (sub menus disappeared until rebooted) when memory was short for example running another app in the background and it became frequent enough that I abandoned Aeon Nox and eventually settled on Amber.
Well yesterday I discovered that System Update was sitting in the background all the time consuming approximately 250MB of ram at all times. I knew that automatically check for updates was enabled in OS X, but I didn't realise such a memory hogging daemon was sitting in the background all the time to serve that function... so I turned off automatic updates and I now have about 300-350MB of free ram at all times with XMBC running for the first time in over a year.
So a tip to Mac OS users with only 1GB of ram - disable automatic checking for system updates!
Since then I haven't been able to reproduce the glitch, hence suspecting it may be memory related. I'll revert the Software update setting temporarily so that memory is short again and see if I can reproduce it over the next few days.
You would think that virtual memory would prevent an allocation failure but apparently not as Aeon Nox would definitely malfunction when ram was low even though XBMC would otherwise function normally.
Because Amber is such a light skin (probably lighter than even Confluence) that would make sense that the issue doesn't appear with Amber if it has lower memory requirements than the default skin.