General stability of Beta? (Crashes per day)

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

we use Unity 5 Beta since a couple of weeks and have around 3-10 crash per working day, depending on the typical use of the editor. (In Unity 4.6, this was a lot worse - due to the 32-bit limit, so we are kind of used to frequent crashes.)

The editor usually crashes when switching to play mode for the X’th time. Recently the crashes seem to occur much more frequently (most probably not because of Unity, but because we keep adding assets). I can reliable reproduce errors now (with Beta 19) by loading my test scene here and switching to play mode two times, so I thought I give it a shot and ask whether you are interested in a repro-case, or whether memory-related crashes in huge projects are a work in progress anyway?

The crash seems to be memory-related, but the exact message varies. Sometimes there is a console log with a totally strange stack trace. Or some generic “TypeInitializationError” in standard .NET classes or just things like “SceneView”…). Sometimes, the Unity bug reporter tool opens after the crash, sometimes not.

We didn’t file a standard bug report with the report tool yet since the problem seem to occur only in our big project repository, which is around 50 GB to upload. If you are interested, we could arrange an GIT access or a snapshot download to our repo (compressed “only” a couple of GB).

A typical crash stack trace in some “strange” place:

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
  at System.NumberFormatter.ResetCharBuf (Int32 size) [0x00007] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:553
  at System.NumberFormatter.FormatGeneral (Int32 precision, System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo nfi) [0x00077] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:1322
  at System.NumberFormatter.NumberToString (System.String format, System.Globalization.NumberFormatInfo nfi) [0x00070] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:1065
  at System.NumberFormatter.NumberToString (System.String format, Single value, IFormatProvider fp) [0x00078] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:887
  at System.Single.ToString (System.String format, IFormatProvider provider) [0x00000] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/Single.cs:256
  at System.String.FormatHelper (System.Text.StringBuilder result, IFormatProvider provider, System.String format, System.Object[] args) [0x00152] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/String.cs:1941
  at System.String.Format (IFormatProvider provider, System.String format, System.Object[] args) [0x00000] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/String.cs:1873
  at UnityEditor.PrefColor.ToUniqueString () [0x00042] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\Animation\ZoomableArea.cs:255
  at UnityEditor.Settings.Set[PrefColor] (System.String name, UnityEditor.PrefColor value) [0x00000] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\Animation\ZoomableArea.cs:422
  at UnityEditor.Settings.Get[PrefColor] (System.String name, UnityEditor.PrefColor defaultValue) [0x00021] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\Animation\ZoomableArea.cs:419
  at UnityEditor.PrefColor..ctor (System.String name, Single defaultRed, Single defaultGreen, Single defaultBlue, Single defaultAlpha) [0x0000d] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\Animation\ZoomableArea.cs:217
  at UnityEditor.SceneView..cctor () [0x00014] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\Sprites\SpriteUtilityWindow.cs:66
Rethrow as TypeInitializationException: An exception was thrown by the type initializer for UnityEditor.SceneView

Attached is another typical message we see often (CheckDisalow.png)

1917526--123742--CheckDisalow.png

1 Like
2

Oh, and btw… I am a co-worker of Korbinian who posted a similar problem here, although his post is from stand-alone builds, where these problems here are from in-editor “play” mode changes. I am not 100% sure, but I think I saw some “System.MonoCustomAttrs” in the editor-stack traces too, so this might be as well the exact same error…

3

My “reliable” test case here, where it crashes after exactly play/stop/play in my current test scene stops being reliable when I remove a couple of prefab instances and place them again. (I need more than 2 play-mode changes for the crash).

So this might not be only an out-of-memory problem. Another co-worker suspects that bug #653352 he reported is not in Beta 19 yet, although its marked as fixed as “in next beta release”?

4

bump? Anybody from Unity likes to comment?

5

Hi! We would very much like a bug report on this, thank you for taking time to report it. We can sort out repository access when you have reported it.

Thanks!

6

Awesome. I’ll zip some archive together and ask our admin to put it on some downloadable location and then file a bug report with the link today.

@KEngelsoft: Could you check whether the fix for 653352 is already included in Beta 19, please?

7

Yes, 653352 was verified as fixed in b19.

8

The problem seems to be a really sneaky ninja bug. After some necessary DLL replacements to be able to launch the project outside our environment here, the problem isn’t easily reproducible anymore (it still crashes occasionally, but not predictable anymore).

I will work in this “DLL replaced” environment in the next couple of days and hope to get another test case where the bug occurs reliable and report back…

9

I know your post was about your specific issue your seeing; but from the title I thought/assumed you were polling people about 5’s general stability and people might come here wondering (if they arent in the beta)

So my experience after using Beta 5 is that most nights I do not crash at all. About once per week I go through an evening where the editor will crash after I make a scene change, then a code change, and then tab back to the editor.

Oddly enough the next evening it goes away. So its possible a system restart might fix it when it comes up but of course I’m reluctant to do that because I’m trying to get my work done for the evening.

So I give it a 4 out of 5 stars for stability right now.:eyes:

1 Like
10

Seems like you guys are getting useful debug messages at least. I crash about 1/4th the time I hit play in the editor and its always just an Access Violation crash so nothing useful to report.

11

Yes. That’s the most common crash here too. The editor.log in your Local AppData directory usually only contains a line “CRASH!!!” somewhere in the middle but no usefull stack trace thingie or anything.

Although… 1/4th of the time… that’s hard… I feel you, bro… :frowning: :wink:

12

@KEngelstoft : I have send a bug report under Number 668506 together with a download link for an striped down snapshot of our project (I removed all audio and textures).

It seems not to be memory related. After deleting all textures and wav files, the problem still occurs. The memory usage of the editor is merely 1.3GB after startup.

I would be glad for any kind of feedback what could cause the frequent crashes.

Best regards, Imi.

13

Thank you for reporting this @Immanuel-Scholz :slight_smile:

14

Does the stack trace output to editor.log, or output_data.txt for standalone builds, ever output any beyond “OUPUTTING STACK TRACE” with Windows 5b14 32-bit or 5b18 64-bit? My team is seeing frequent crashes, and we’d really like a lead from a log file, or some kind of debugging capability.

15

RC1 still contains the frequent crashes for us. Is there any progress in this issue? Could you reproduce the crash?

The bug issue (668506) has one reply from Ieva from QA team asking whether the lots of console logging errors after loading the project in the editor are normal. I replied that they are. No other reply so far.

Can I be of help to get this resolved?

16

It seems like our bug reporter or something is not invoking?

Is there a dialog or something before the process closes? If so, you then have a chance of taking a crash minidump or otherwise to get a crash stack. If you could get that, and add it to the bug report, it would be most helpful.

17

There is usually no unity bug reporter opening at the end. Sometimes there is, but as I said - the actual errors are varying.

I was hoping that you can reproduce the case to be able to better debug the cause(s). (After the initial library import, it takes me about two minutes of play/stop/assembly reload/play/stop/assembly reload … until it crashes.)

But I will try to get a .dmp file via Visual Studio, if that is of any help…?

18

Is there any news here? The frequent crashes really bogging us down. I estimate, that we are loosing at least 25% of our work time waiting for Unity to crash and restart. The stability seems to be worse than ever before, (agian: this is probably related to us pumping more and more assets into the project, not because Unity versions getting more instable).

Some developer here even don’t bother anymore trying to press “Stop” in the editor but just directly killing the Unity.exe process from task manager when they pressed played once, as the probability to get it playing a second time is near to zero. :frowning:

The fact that unity is gone “Release Candidate” with these stability issues makes me wonder whether we are just an exception here and whether we use some “unusual” code part of the editor that we could avoid to not have it crash so often… Any hints from the crash dumps so far?

19

Did you check Editor.log, maybe it contains something useful?

20

No, there is still nothing usefull. It seems to be the same problem as I wrote before: Usually the line “Crash!!!” is the first hint of something gone wrong.

After that, there is a list of loaded DLL’s and then

========== OUTPUTING STACK TRACE ==================

00000000084E8933 (Mono JIT Code) [/Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/Enum.cs:186] System.MonoEnumInfo:GetInfo (System.Type,System.MonoEnumInfo&)

and that’s it. Before the Crash!!! - line there isn’t anything suspicious either (i.e. lots of “this message is harmless” lines)

But sometimes, there are gazillions of strange exception like in my very first post before the crash. Here is an example of the first exception of another crash I had just now:

Platform assembly: C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Data\Managed\Unity.DataContract.dll (this message is harmless)
Platform assembly: C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Data\Mono\lib\mono\2.0\System.Core.dll (this message is harmless)
Platform assembly: C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Data\Managed\Unity.IvyParser.dll (this message is harmless)
Error enumerating assemblies looking for package manager. System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

  at System.NumberFormatter.ResetCharBuf (Int32 size) [0x00007] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:553

  at System.NumberFormatter.FastIntegerToString (Int32 value, IFormatProvider fp) [0x00032] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:1013

  at System.NumberFormatter.NumberToString (Int32 value, IFormatProvider fp) [0x00025] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/NumberFormatter.cs:939

  at System.Int32.ToString () [0x00000] in /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System/Int32.cs:672

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Syntax.Parser.ResolveReferences () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Syntax.Parser.ParseRegularExpression (System.String pattern, RegexOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.CreateMachineFactory (System.String pattern, RegexOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.InitNewRegex () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Init () [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex..ctor (System.String pattern, RegexOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match (System.String input, System.String pattern, RegexOptions options) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match (System.String input, System.String pattern) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at Unity.DataContract.PackageVersion..ctor (System.String version) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

  at UnityEditor.Modules.ModuleManager.InitializePackageManager (System.Reflection.Assembly assembly, Unity.DataContract.PackageInfo package) [0x0006e] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\ParticleSystemEditor\ParticleSystemModules\UVModuleUI.cs:55

  at UnityEditor.Modules.ModuleManager.RegisterPackageManager () [0x0003e] in C:\buildslave\unity\build\Editor\Mono\ParticleSystemEditor\ParticleSystemModules\SubModuleUI.cs:43

I don’t think that these are the places where things go wrong. To me, this screams like a memory corruption bug within either the C++ part of unity or even a bug in Mono.exe. That’s why I was hoping to give you a reproducible test case. (In my experience, crash dumps of memory corruption bugs are not super helpful as they show you the state when things already went wrong for a while. When I have to trace one of these bugs down, I always try to get my hands on reliable repro case to be able to debug while the stuff is happening).

Anyway… I’ve emailed the last two editor logs (where the examples above are coming from) to the bug issue 668506. Maybe you can have a look and find some anomalies or identify some known problems?

Thanks for your help,
Immanuel Scholz