Hi Northpoint,
I’ve added some flags to perspective in an effort to try and identify what you are seeing. I’d like to do three things to start.
- enable deeper logging
- use in-memory cache
- increase designer memory
Follow the instructions below, doing each step in order, and trying to launch the designer (and collect logs) in between each attempt. By the end, you’ll want all 3 changes enabled/set when you launch.
Instructions
First, we’re going to enable some direct logging to disk from the chromium engine by setting a new flag we’ve added that will stream output from the internal browser engine directly to log files on the machine. The hope here is that we can collect logging information earlier in the startup process. Also, in setting this flag, we set all browser loggers to log all messages.
To enable this mode, we simply need to add a flag to our designer launcher in the “Manage” section of the launcher config
Once there, in the JVM Arguments field, add the line -Dperspective.browser.logToDisk=true and without making additional changes, save the changes, and try launching the designer.
On startup, a successfully launched designer will now have a log message that looks like 08:40:37.202 [Designer-Startup] INFO Perspective.Designer - JxBrowser engine logging to file system at /Users/someuser/.ignition/cache/some.host.com_29980/C1/perspective/log/jxbrowser
If you navigate to that folder, you’ll find 3 binary log files named:
- jxbrowser-browser.log
- jxbrowser-ipc.log
- jxbrowser-process.log
If you don’t get far enough in startup to view the designer logs, simply run a sudo find / -name "jxbrowser-browser.log" and you should find the appropriate cache directory.
These files are viewable in the standard mac log viewer, go ahead and send them as well as any additional info/log files to us.
With that step done (and assuming no change), shutdown the designer and we’ll add another flag:
-Dperspective.browser.cache.useMemory=true
This flag puts the internal pages into an ‘incognito’ mode, which keeps all cacheing in memory rather than writing to disk. In the designer, this has some minor memory and performance implications, but the tradeoff is reduced disk IO (and the potential read/write/permission errors that can originate from file IO).
After adding this flag, go ahead and save and try launching the designer again without any further changes.
If you see the same behavior, grab the jxbrowser logs again, as well as designer logs and send them our way.
After that step, let’s increase the memory of the designer by changing the Max Heap value in the designer launcher management screen. Set it to somewhere between 2048M and 4096M and try launching again, just to rule out memory issues.
Again, collect the log files and any additional info you are able to provide and send it over.
Let’s see where that gets us, and we’ll find some next steps depending on the outcome.
-Perry