Application will not force quit
Dorian Gray
was only halfway plugged into my external iSight camera, which would
have been the likely cause).
When I went to force quit, it was shown as not responding, and when I
did force quit, it disappeared from the force quit menu. However the
Skype icon remained active on the dock, and Skype was still shown in the
command-tab list. Bringing up the force quit menu again showed Skype
was back there (this time not listed as not responding), and force
quitting it again made it disappear from the force quit menu (again).
But nothing changed.
Repeat ad nauseam.
Trying to relaunch Skype from the application folder gave a Finder error.
I found an apparently orphaned Skype process using ps, but kill -9 did
not kill it.
In the end I had to restart the machine in order to abandon the crashed
Skype instance and relaunch Skype.
Any other experience of force quit being ineffective? Any explanation
for such behaviour?
Jaimie Vandenbergh
<D.G...@picture.invalid> wrote:
>Any other experience of force quit being ineffective? Any explanation
>for such behaviour?
Usually it means that the application has caused trouble down in
kernel land - so it's not the app itself that is ignoring you, it's
that the kernel is waiting for something to happen in order internally
before it'll process the kill signal.
This isn't meant to happen, of course. Skype, however, has
historically been a bugger for it. I've had more kernel
panics/freezes/shutdowns from Skype than any other software since
Windows 95.
I've not had any such crap with it on Snow Leopard (yet), but I'm not
running the current release of Skype - I am using the old beta (the
first one with video) and updating to any later version comes up with
a "cannot read database" error and fails to start.
Cheers - Jaimie
--
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Rowland McDonnell
I've met that sort of thing (never used Skype) quite often - by which I
mean a frequency that many others would call `rare as a blue moon' but
isn't, actually.
> Any explanation
> for such behaviour?
Not a clue - just something that happens sometimes. No idea why, no
idea what's going on, never found a fix other than a reboot.
Not seen it with 10.6.1 yet; did see it lots with 10.4 (including
10.4.11, fully updated).
Rowland.
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Peter Ceresole
> This isn't meant to happen, of course. Skype, however, has
> historically been a bugger for it. I've had more kernel
> panics/freezes/shutdowns from Skype than any other software since
> Windows 95.
I agree.
It's got a bit better; I'm now on 2.7, and that seems fairly reliable.
But I hadn't fired it up for some time, and when I did just now to check
the version, it offered me an update to 2.8. I clicked yes, and it
started a download so slow that it would have taken five hours. This on
a line that's giving more thasn 4Mbps. So I stopped it.
But Skype is one of the rare applications that has forced me to restart,
several times. It was almost like using OS8 again, rather than 10.4.11.
--
Peter
Clive Sinclair
This occasionally does happen for me - probably 2 or 3 times in the last
12 months. Compared to Windoze - it's hardly worth mentioning.
--
Clive
We don't die, we just stop paying taxes.
Dorian Gray
pe...@cara.demon.co.uk (Peter Ceresole) wrote:
> Jaimie Vandenbergh <jai...@sometimes.sessile.org> wrote:
>
> > This isn't meant to happen, of course. Skype, however, has
> > historically been a bugger for it. I've had more kernel
> > panics/freezes/shutdowns from Skype than any other software since
> > Windows 95.
>
> I agree.
Thanks all. Thinking back, I think I didn't notice the iSight's
firewire cable being half-in/half-out until I restarted; that might have
been the cause of the kernel freeze that prevented Skype from being
force quit; perhaps Skype wasn't really to blame in this case.
But I take your point about Skype being flaky - it "Quits unexpectedly"
more than any other application, except perhaps Safari 3. Safari 4
seems better so far.
P.S. Skype 2.8 is worth the upgrade:
- better sound and video,
- screen sharing (or even part of it),
- Skype Access meaning painless use of Wifi hotspots all over the world
(e.g. airports) without having to sign in or enter credit card details,
and 11p/min (ex. VAT) coming straight out of Skype credit, instead of
paying for a minimum of an hour.
Peter Ceresole
> Skype 2.8 is worth the upgrade
Good. I hope so, because I just downloaded it- yesterday the server was
so slow the download would have taken 5 hours. Today. about a minute.
--
Peter
Cloudane
> Any other experience of force quit being ineffective? Any explanation
> for such behaviour?
Hi
In my experience, the only time anything is un-killable in OSX is when
it's failing to access a file. Be it a drive problem or trying to
access a network share that isn't there, it seems to send OSX - or
rather, Darwin - into a right tizzy. But as with Clive (or is it "Sir"
Clive ;-)), it only happens to me a couple of times a year at most.
It's probably nothing, but it might be worth running drive repair
sometime off the installation DVD, and checking SMART status under Disk
Utility, just in case there's something untoward going on.
--
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Pd
> Last night Skype crashed
[...]
> In the end I had to restart the machine in order to abandon the crashed
> Skype instance and relaunch Skype.
>
> Any other experience of force quit being ineffective?
Interesting - the same thing happened to me yesterday. All sorts of
oddities, in that Finder relaunched itself a couple of times, menus
would flash but wouldn't select. The computer was still running, CPU and
network monitors showed almost no activity but Skype was firmly wedged.
Again, the only recourse was a restart.
--
Pd
Martin-S
peter...@gmail.invalid (Pd) wrote:
> The computer was still running, CPU and
> network monitors showed almost no activity but Skype was firmly wedged.
Skype has been trouble free for me, but I've also had occasional
problems force-quitting other applications.
It seems to happen randomly, but sometimes, when the force-quit window
wouldn't work, I was able to force-quit the application via the context
menu in the dock.
--
Martin
Peter Ceresole
> The computer was still running, CPU and
> network monitors showed almost no activity but Skype was firmly wedged.
>
> Again, the only recourse was a restart.
Again; yes, I've seen this with Skype, but pretty well with nothing
else. Except for some kernel panics with 10.2, caused by a faulty USB
hub (and totally cured by changing the hub) I've not seen any other
examples of apps that won't force quit.
As Martin says, if the force quit window doesn't work (very unusual)
then force quit via the dock does. The problem with Skype was that
several times it never let me get that far. At which point,
Cmd-Opt-power is your friend. Hmmmm. It's so long since I did that, it
may be some other key combo, but I'm not going to try it now; life's too
short for that kind of stuff.
--
Peter
Peter Ceresole
> > Skype 2.8 is worth the upgrade
>
> Good. I hope so, because I just downloaded it
And Dorian is right; Skype 2.8 is really very nice in 10.4.11, and from
the use I've made of it so far seems as stable as you could wish.
--
Peter