MacBook Pro crashing - from Android Emulator?

Question

Ever since I started Android development a few months ago, my MacBook Pro (latest version Lion OS) crashes pretty regularly. (A large rectangular message box comes up in the middle of my screen telling me the operating system has crashed, press the power button to reboot).

The only thing common to all of these crashes (that I can tell) is that Android Emulator is open.

I used to use Eclipse for Android development, and I thought the problem could be Eclipse-related. But lately I have been preferring IntelliJ, and the crashing still happens. Therefore I think it is safe to rule out Eclipse and IntelliJ as the cause.

Actually, Chrome is pretty much always open as well, and usually has some 15 tabs. Could that be the problem?

Anyone else noticing crashes on Mac?

Answer 1

if you are working with your android device connected to the USB port, try working without it. I used to have exactly the same problem and after unplugging the device it disappeared.

Answer 2

The same thing is happening to me. Open the console and check your system diagnostic reports. I've had 6 system crashes in the last two weeks and on every one I get the following message:

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: emulator-arm

I'm not sure what to do about it. Right now I have 4Gig ram and I'm going to upgrade but I'm not convinced that will do anything.

* Update * I upgraded to 8G of memory and the number of system crashes has come down. I'm not sure that's the reason but so far it seems to be working.

Answer 3

Hmm... well in my experience, Android Development and having a massive amount of Chrome tabs open usually go hand-in-hand, so I definitely wouldn't rule out one over the other.

I can't give you an exact answer to your problem without knowing more, but what I can tell you is that I'm running a Macbook Pro 8,2 (2.2 ghz, 4gb ram, 750gb) with the latest version of Lion installed, and I have never had the operating system shut down on me (even when running the emulator with 20+ Chrome tabs open). From the information you have given me, it does seem that the underlying problem is a memory issue (Mac operating system crashes often are). With each tab running its own separate process, Chrome can eat away at your memory fairly quickly and having the emulator running definitely doesn't help.

Have you upgraded to Lion recently? If your hard drive is almost full, this could be due to severe disk fragmentation after an OS upgrades (but this is only a guess). If this were true the system wouldn't have easy access to swap memory when there is no available RAM.