I’ve been using the Unity editor for a bit over a year now, and I’ve almost always found it to be remarkably stable on my system.
Recently, though, I’ve started to encounter a very strange problem. When using the Unity editor, sometimes my entire computer will freeze. It becomes entirely unresponsive and accepts no input. The only way to get it working again is to do a hard reboot. This issue is really hard for me to debug, since I’m not getting any kind of blue screen, error code, or other feedback to indicate what’s going on. My initial gut reaction is that it’s probably not a Unity bug, but rather, something wrong with my system. The strangeness, though, is that the freezes only seem to happen when I’m using Unity. I can use all of my other development tools (Eclipse, Visual Studio, 3DS Max) without issue, and I can play games all day on it.
I’ll try to provide as much relevant information here as I can.
-The freezes seem to happen randomly. Sometimes I’ll be writing code in MonoDevelop, sometimes I’ll be building my project, sometimes I’ll be moving an asset in a scene, and sometimes I’ll just be idling. The only common element of the freezes are that they’re happening when I’m using Unity.
-I never saw behavior this before I upgraded to Unity 4.
-I have no anti-virus software running on my machine.
-My system specs are as follows:
:Windows 7 Pro x64
:AMD FX 8150
:ASRock 990 Extreme 3 Motherboard
:XFX Radeon 7950
:32GB of Corsair 1600 Memory
I’ve been trying a bunch of things to stop the freezing, but I haven’t had any luck. I’ve tried swapping out the memory, running only 2 sticks at a time, and have run memtest for hours and hours without any errors reported. I’ve checked all of my drivers and made sure that they’re up to date. I’ve also been monitoring my CPU temperatures (thinking that my system may be overheating), but they’re staying cool.
Has anyone else ever encountered a similar issue? I might have to give up, format my HDD, and reload everything as my next step, but I’d prefer not to do so.
