MacOS Crashing - What Information is Needed?

The past couple of weeks (edited to add: months, not weeks) my Mac has been crashing while using Obsidian. I’m just knowledgeable enough to know that I now need to turn off custom CSS and plug-ins as a start in figuring out what is causing the issue. But, I don’t actually know what to look for after that or how to determine what is and isn’t causing my Mac to suddenly restart.

Any suggestions on what I need to do or information to collect?

Thanks.

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I’ve seen WhiteNoise ask for things like:

  • The size of your vault (in number of files)
  • Your computer specifications (including operating system version and Obsidian version)
  • Where the files are stored (I assume this means on the computer or with a sync service)

Other things that likely are also helpful:

  • If applicable, the steps you performed leading up to the problem
  • If you know how much computer resources Obsidian uses (CPU, memory)
  • If you have large files in your vault (big PDFs, movie files)
  • What features of Obsidian you use (core plugins)
  • Whether you use third-party plugins
  • What your notes typically look like. Do they use embedding? Or Math equations?
  • If your computer also crashes with other applications or only with Obsidian

Hope this helps. :slightly_smiling_face:

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In addition to what @JkNML just mentioned, please open a #bug-reports (select the category when creating a new post) and use the template that is provided there!

@dmc what kind of crash? Kernel Panic, app crash, hang… ?

@JkNML and @argentum - Thank you, I will definitely track and provide that information for future occurrences, if any.

@luckman212 - kernel panic (I had to look that term up). The error report that is generated on restart, and then sent to Apple, mentions something about Obsidian and wheel lock and behavior?

To start, I’m back to using the default theme and I’ve uninstalled the theme-specific community plugins. However, I’m still using all my other installed community plugins. If my system crashes again, I’ll starting turning them off, as well.

I have a new macOS laptop on the way that will become my main Obsidian machine. Perhaps that will resolve the problem.

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@dmc That’s interesting. I say that because I also experienced a kernel panic last week in Obsidian while simply selecting some text and copying it ( ⌘C ) It’s very rare to see something like that in a userspace app like Obsidian. Don’t think I’ve ever experienced it before to be honest: Could have been a fluke, but time will tell if something more serious is going on.

I’ve had that happen about 5 or 6 times now, and only recently in the past couple of months.

It’s happened more than once while I was trying to drag the obsidian window, across my desktop; when I was trying to access a feature or menu from the app ribbon; and the most recent crash is when I was typing in the main window–that happened twice during the same session.

I’m pretty sure these events all occurred while using community themes and community theme plug-ins, so hopefully using the default theme will fix it.

I’ll move this to the archive. Feel free to add more data points in Kernel Panics on macOS 11