#142

I experienced my first KP. Log report pointed to Obsidian Helper. Curiously, I had just reinstalled Obsidian a couple days ago using the new DMG installer.

MacBook Pro 16in, 2019
Intel 6-Core i7, 2.6 GHz
16GB DDR4
Big Sur 11.5.2

Obsidian v0.12.12
Minimal theme
17 Community plugins
7 CSS snippets

I am using a 34" USB-C external display.

Sync is showing a "File system operation timed out" error
#143

I’m starting to blame the monitor - no crashes at work on a small screen, lots at home on a 4k USB-C monitor.

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#144

Not the monitor - just had my 2nd crash of the day with no monitor attached.

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#145

Kernel panics are very time wasting, nerve killing, very counter productive and ask ends users for technical flip flops without actually resolving the underlying problems.

This topic is hard to discuss, even between developers as each and every one pushes responsibilities on somebody else.
The developer of Obsidian did a great job to mitigate the inherent problem but of course, can’t address each and every issue.

I understand that working on features is much nicer than to debug… Debugging is very time consuming and discouraging at times. Still, Kernel Panics need more attention. Compatibility of a software is one thing, integration another. Sorry for the suggestion, but maybe, the devs should limit what Plugins are able to do.

Sources of problems are

  • Multiple versions of Chrome / Electron based apps running, mixed versions of the same framework (older /newer implementations)
  • older preferences (chrome)
  • Sleep mode + Obsidian
  • Corrupt or bad theme
  • Plugins

Solutions

  • check if your monitor cable, computer cable is plugged in tightly, pull out all cables, wait 10 minutes and plug in again Firmly but not with force - this is the pram reset for desktop computers
  • fresh install of the newest Obsidian and electron based apps (use an Uninstaller like Appcleaner
  • repair your HDD or SSD permissions with Disk Utility but in recovery mode (Mac startup key combinations - Apple Support), you can repair some permissions, if you are running MacOS, repairing permissions never harms
  • depending on your machine (laptop is more vulnerable) avoid the global graph view on big databases
  • try to switch off Hw acceleration and see Obsidians performance for a week
  • Don’t sync your data all the times with the cloud - rather, use cloud more for backup
  • Don’t run multiple electron / chromium apps simultaneously (they could use older frameworks and conflict each other)
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#146

I want to chime in a second to reiterate that we do not have any specific evidence that suggests that plugings, or older version of electron, or sleep mode, or themes are the issues here.
For what we know, so far, and we aren’t 100% sure, this is an issue triggered by macosx and node.js file system api (which we use a lot). If you search electron and kernel panic you’ll see many other software lamenting the same problem. This is ultimately on apple’s court to fix. We and other devs have been trying to escalade the issue.

3 Likes
#147

@WhiteNoise
I experienced the very same issue as @obadiahcruz

Something awful must happen behind the scenes to crash my MacPro. I’ve enough capacity on my system to run everything I want, smoothly and stable
I didn’t have Kernel Panics for ages, this makes me feel very bitter - Obsidian is awesome but I’m not too excited about its framework, Java and electron, chromium. Today many browsers use chromium but apparently many apps as well (apple store)

So I’m adding my 2 cents to this topic, and not by summarizing what others say to put myself at the center. Let me explain why I wrote what I wrote previously :

I added Plugins, because Plugins extend Obsidians code adding to a potential vulnerability, electron because the problems with electron aren’t isolated, also sleep mode, because I had a violent double shutdown KP whilst waking up my computer and working with Obsidian, themes because they interact with draw processes which might conflict, especially if the theme is malformed

I code myself for a decade already but only in ObjC, applescript and bash shell, in future I’ll learn Kotlin.
Sometimes little code corrections adjust everything bad, and you forget you ever had some problems with your code.

Obsidian keeps running 3 or 4 additional helpers in the background. Do they interact only with the gpu or more? What happens all in the background?
The graph in Obsidian is very resource intensive but we don’t use it to work, just to explore and we don’t look at it all times…

If you start to limit a process to the bone, you learn very quickly how to prevent any crashes. I would prefer if Obsidian would get a mechanism to quit itself before to cause any harm to my system.

KP are not the problem if isolated, but can’t be a constant. From the videos seen and the discussions online I know the user base of Obsidian who uses Mac isn’t a small percentage.

Because getting KP isn’t working, it’s just a mess. And with mess I don’t wanna insult anyone working on the code of Obsidian. Otherwise, I wouldn’t take the time to write my post.
I also don’t want to try with Notion because it uses electron as well. Obsidian is awesome, but let’s remove this KP for good

#148

Then don’t. The devs aren’t being lazy; no one can come up with a reliable repro so saying “remove this KP for good” isn’t … helpful.

It’s small comfort for those experiencing it, but it does not appear that most mac users experience this. If it were in the dev’s power to just fix it, they would.

2 Likes
#149

i did not write 2 lines and threw it there: “just fix it”…
We are adult people who should not be offended so easily - i really hope we agree on this at least
if you dont experience KP then it does not matter for you. Everything changes if you get the real problem.

#150

I want to reiterate that Kernel Panics are OS problems. We are one of many electron apps who is suffering from this. Apple should look into this.

I also understand that from the user POV this is irrelevant information.

3 Likes
#151

Here to report a second KP today. Two things I noticed since a month ago when I experienced the first one:

  • Both times it happened with external monitors plugged, one of which is rather big.
  • Both times battery was running low.
#152

I understood that Apple should provide a fix but they probably won’t, or only for the newest systems. Anyway, I agree - and thanks for sharing your point

Would you recommend to update Download | Node.js ?

#153

I don’t know what Apple will do. I have no other recommendation other than to submit your crashes to Apple.

#154

Third KP, just 5 days after. This time battery was full so I am discarding that. I’m beginning to work with only one screen and see what happens (though I see @mo-seph reported he had a crash with no external monitors attached).

I have sent all my crash reports to Apple. Is there really nothing else we can do to drive attention to this? I really don’t want my computer to be damaged at some point and will hate to give up Obsidian.

#155

Maybe it’s fixed in Monterey? I am not sure Apple publishes detailed release notes for macOS…

#156

The most useful hint so far for me is that it may have something to do with Obsidian after waking up from sleep mode. So I tend to kill obsidian and restart everytime I wake up the computer. (Which is not ideal, but it starts super fast, so not as bad as it might be…)

#157

Actually I’m starting to suspect Citations as well. I was (still am) a pretty active user of Citation and kept it on all the time. I was having kernel panics very frequently. Sometimes I even got 2-3 per day. After I saw your post I turned off Citations and only turn it on when I have to use it, then turn it back off and restart Obsidian. Had no kernel panics for a couple of weeks (well, except for a couple times I forgot to turn off Citations…).

I do want to say that I love the Citations plugin and it’s not necessarily its fault, coz KPs don’t appear to happen to every users. Just saying that KPs on my machine may have something to do with some interactions with Citations. But this may not be the case for others, as KPs can be caused by many reasons.

#158

Not to alarm you or anyone else, or to suggest that my particular experience is representative of anything other than my very particular workstation setup, but I hear you on not wanting to damage anything. I was at one point doing a lot of coding with customJS and Dataview, and when I started doing that I started seeing KP’s MUCH more frequently, at one point it felt like every other time I saved my scripts in customJS. And I tried a lot of things, going with external/without external monitor, quitting and re-opening after each script update and after waking my laptop from sleep, etc. Until one day I started having issues with my laptop performance overall. Finally, my Wi-Fi completely crapped out. I will probably never know if it was related to the KP’s, but nothing I did could bring my Wi-Fi back. In safe mode it worked, but even with Apple Support’s help, resetting PRAM, etc. etc., we couldn’t isolate the issue. Apple finally just advised something had become corrupted in my data somewhere, and that I should just reinstall everything from scratch. It was NOT a pleasant experience. After reinstalling everything, I stopped messing with customJS and Dataview for a while, and in fact I stopped using Obsidian much for a while. But I recently fired it up and started using it actively again, and I just had another KP today, which brought me back here.

This experience has shaken my faith in the stability of the app. I completely understand that plugins are used at your own risk, but so much of the value in Obsidian is in its extensibility that I wonder whether I would want to use it in its bare-bones default state. I’m hoping Monterey brings some relief, because as is, Obsidian is starting to feel like an app that is forever in beta. I hate saying this, because I absolutely love the community and am in awe of the developers. But at some point as a user you have to focus on your work and stop worrying about the stability of your app.

Fingers crossed.

#159

Again, to reiterate, this neither a plugin problem nor an Obsidian problem. This is Apple’s problem.
All other electron apps that deal with files have these crashes on some Mac systems.

#160

Point taken. Continuing to file crash reports with Apple.

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#161

It has not happened for a long time now on 12.0.1. Is it fixed?

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