[HN Gopher] Restarting macOS apps automatically on crash
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Restarting macOS apps automatically on crash
Author : alin23
Score : 26 points
Date : 2023-09-01 19:50 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.alinpanaitiu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.alinpanaitiu.com)
| prmoustache wrote:
| solution looking for a problem
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm not really a fan of auto-restart on crash. In some cases, it
| could cause damage.
|
| I consider a crash - _any_ crash, to be my fault. This includes
| things like yanking out the power cord (which probably will just
| stop the program counter, as opposed to careening off into the
| weeds).
|
| No matter how abusive the user is, no matter how out-of-band
| their behavior, my software should _never_ crash.
|
| I love crashes. They tend to be easy to fix (of course, thread
| collisions are another matter). If I can reliably reproduce a
| crash, I can usually fix it in a few minutes.
|
| In iOS, Apple makes it impossible to quit an app. I have heard of
| developers deliberately forcing a crash to do that, but, if Apple
| catches you doing it, they'll yank the app. They won't approve
| apps they can get to crash. In fact, they have, in the past,
| found crashes that I missed.
|
| Just better off, writing software that can handle always-on, and
| that doesn't crash.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Bonus: restart on hang
|
| This is not good for battery life. I'm not sure how to
| heuristically detect hangs in a power-friendly way.
| [deleted]
| nottheengineer wrote:
| "My software crashes so often that it's worth the time to
| automate restarting it" is what I'd expect of a windows user. Has
| macOS really gotten that bad over the last few years? I remember
| being forced to use it a long time ago and while it was very
| limited and special, nothing ever crashed or was visibly buggy.
| dagmx wrote:
| If you don't know why the app is crashing, then you don't know
| enough to blame the OS or the ecosystem. That's true of any
| operating system. Apps aren't magically crash free because
| they're on a Mac. Dereferencing an invalid pointer can still
| segfault you just as quickly.
| [deleted]
| dylan604 wrote:
| Why is the assumption the OS is the fault and not the app doing
| something it shouldn't be doing so the system slaps it? If the
| OS was at fault, would not the OS be crashing rather than the
| app. To me, it sounds like the OS is working nicely with a
| misbehaving app.
|
| Maybe the better question would be if the OS SDK is to a state
| that doing naughty things is easier to do, but again, that's
| not the OS
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> "My software crashes so often that it's worth the time to
| automate restarting it" is what I'd expect of a windows user. _
|
| This is insulting even for windows users.
| fortran77 wrote:
| That's why I flagged it.
| labster wrote:
| Yes, but it's also funny, and not mean-spirited or targeted
| at a specific person. Windows users are in no way a
| protected class.
| tom_ wrote:
| Which OS do you use? It sounds like it can't be Linux! Looking
| forward to hearing about this crash-free nirvana.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The only app that has been crashing or freeze, on my Fedora
| box these last few years is a Microsoft app: Edge.
| fortran77 wrote:
| MacOS applications are just like applications on any other
| platform. Why the juvenile Windows bashing?
| brailsafe wrote:
| No they're not, otherwise we'd use those other platforms.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I use Windows.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 100% of crashes on my M1 MBA occur in applications when
| accessing files over SMB network shares. One every couple of
| days. I have to restart about once every week or two because it
| borks the system completely.
|
| But when I'm not connected to an SMB drive, I don't think I've
| had a single crash in years.
|
| I have no idea if it's something in the SMB driver itself
| that's crashing, or assumptions inside of application logic
| that fail in certain SMB scenarios.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It's faulty app logic, assuming an io error cannot occur
| accessing a filesystem. They'll also crash if you have disk
| issues or driver problems. The important thing is they may
| not even realize they're calling into a function or routine
| that can access the fs for something!
|
| All io access needs to be recoverable or catchable for your
| app not to crash. You'd be surprised how much background fs
| activity there can be in apps (or indirectly triggered by
| apps!) all the time.
| brailsafe wrote:
| That and sandboxing effects with perhaps improperly
| accessed bookmark data
|
| I'm building a macos app now, and only because I wasn't
| catching fs access error did I realize I needed to handle
| folder access carefully when using bookmarks in core data.
| nottheengineer wrote:
| SMB really is hell. I write business software and our admins
| do what they can to avoid using it because it's very hard to
| know when it fails.
|
| But from a dev perspective, that's probably a driver level
| issue because that's where you want to handle or propagate
| errors instead of crashing.
| pram wrote:
| Stuff like this with NFS was my living nightmare for years.
| On Linux it would put processes into the D state and you'd
| have to restart the entire machine to fix anything.
| bandergirl wrote:
| I expecting to see logic to detect crash loops. What happens
| then?
| tempodox wrote:
| Exactly, I wouldn't be comfortable just blindly auto-restarting
| an app after a crash. macOS offers a "Relaunch" button in these
| situations, so you can restart it interactively. That's good
| enough for me.
| saagarjha wrote:
| One should be careful about what they put in a signal handler.
| Doing complex things like calling into Foundation, especially in
| a signal handler that indicates something has really gone wrong,
| is probably not a good idea.
| cryptonector wrote:
| I came here for this. Signal handlers have to do only async-
| signal-safe things.
| alberth wrote:
| Reminds my how Basecamp use to restart their Rails app 400
| times/day.
|
| https://dhh.dk/posts/31-myth-2-rails-is-expected-to-crash-40...
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(page generated 2023-09-02 23:01 UTC)