Confidence Monitor crashes Mac - goes back to login page

Helensburgh and Stanwell Park Anglican Church

Hi,

We have been struggling with an intermittent issue for a few weeks now where our Mac crashes back to it's login page when running proclaim (this is happening because Windowserver is also crashing).

We've narrowed it down to a very specific use case...

We have three monitors. The third monitor (which we use for a confidence monitor) is run over a USB-VGA adaptor.

If we run slides on the third monitor - it seems to work perfectly well.

But if we run the confidence output on the third monitor - it crashes after a dozen slides or so.

It doesn't seem to be a problem with the confidence output alone - if we run the confidence output on our projector (second monitor over a display port) it seems to work just fine.

It seems to be the combination of the USB-VGA adaptor being used to output the confidence display.

But this is also very recent - it's been running in this configuration for about 6 months without any problems, but in the last couple of weeks it happens at least once per service.

We are running proclaim V 1.35.0.0148 and Mac OS 10.10.5.

Proclaim logs are attached. Any ideas?

2234.Proclaim Logs.zip

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Helensburgh and Stanwell Park Anglican Church

Poke - We haven't heard anything on this...

Jordan Sjodin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/848400#Comment_848400

Hello, sorry for late reply. I am currently looking into this issue. Specifically, if we changed anything recently that could cause this. Your logs definitely show the WindowServer crashing, which makes me think this is a little bigger than Proclaim..

While I am looking on our end, could you see if there are any driver updates for your USB->VGA device? I know with ones I have here (USB->HDMI) they had installers for macOS that I needed to install from their websites. Perhaps they have an update that fixes it?

I’ll reply back here with anything I find.

Jordan Sjodin

Helensburgh and Stanwell Park Anglican Church

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/848594#Comment_848594

Hi Jordan,

Thanks for looking into it. I can confirm we are on the latest drivers.

I thought it was just an OS issue at first, there are plenty of examples in forums of WindowServer crashing while running multiple monitors.

And of course the USB-VGA adaptor is a clear suspect.

But I can only replicate the fault using Proclaim, and only with the confidence screen - which is very odd.

I can run slides on it, I can play video over it for days (badly), I can use the monitor as the desktop and run other applications no worries. But as soon as I use it for the confidence monitor, with simple black and white text, I can get it to crash within a few slides.

Jordan Sjodin

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/848696#Comment_848696

From what I have read about this issue and from what I see in our code, we haven’t made any changes that should cause this to happen. Everything points to a bad graphics card (i.e. the USB->VGA adapter). Apple even shipped some bad Nvidia cards that were causing this issue and had to replace their MacBooks.

So I feel like it is the VGA adapter, although Proclaim may be acting as a catalyst, I don’t think there is much we can do. Perhaps you can rearrange your monitors so that the Proclaim app sits on the USB-VGA adapter and the outputs are on the other outputs. Maybe that will give you better results?

I wish I could have brought you a better solution.

Helensburgh and Stanwell Park Anglican Church

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/850016#Comment_850016

That's perfectly fine - thanks for looking into it for us.

I don't mind saying it's a dodgy way to drive a monitor. We'll find another more stable way to run.