AppCode 3.1.3 hangs and never returns

Hi Tim.

Please enable the memory indicator (in Preferences | Appearance) and check if memory hits the limit when AppCode becomes unresponsive. If so, try increasing Xmx.
If it doesn't please take and send us a CPU snapshot via appcode-support@jetbrains.com so we could better understand the problem.

Hello Anna,

I have been unable to get the memory increase to work in the way described by your links an idea.vmoptions file does nothing. I have also tried to use an appcode.vmoptions file and it still does nothing. I have, however, been able to increase memory by changing the info.plist file in the application bundle: It's not the way I should do it, I know, but it seems to be allocating a large amount of memory when I set the -Xms VM option.

However I manage to get the memory configured, it doesn't make a difference. The application immediately hangs after starting. It appears to be pinning my CPU in the process.

I cannot capture a CPU snapshot as described in some of the links I found (your link points back to the same page as the memory settings, and has nothing about CPU snapshots). When I look at pages such as https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/entries/29983118-Reporting-performance-problems, it says I must first (a) update my product's ".vmoptions" file to enable the profiling agent and (b) select "Start CPU Profiling" under the Tools menu. This is not possible for me to do, as far as I can tell:

1. As I mentioned above, I don't think the .vmoptions file I put is being recognized. It doesn't matter what I put in there for memory settings at least, so I suspect it is not being found.
2. Even if I could get the .vmoptions file to be correctly set up, I am completely incapable of selecting ANY option from ANY menu. I don't get a menu that I can choose from. I am COMPLETELY hung and can't do anything in the IDE.

When I launch, the app seems to open the project I was working on under 3.1.2. Is there a way I can cause it to forget what I had open and not open any project, possibly preventing it from indexing anything and locking up before I can do anything?

Since my last reply, I have managed to get AppCode up and running again, but only by re-installing from a fresh download. The following summarizes what I found in the process, just in case it is helpful to anyone else.

I was first able to get things running, only barely, by removing the full contents of my Library/Preferences/appCode31 folder and then restarting. When I did that, it came up with no project opened. But when I then opened my project, it immediately hung again.

So I removed my preferences again and launched again, trying to enable CPU snapshots before opening my project. Because the Tools menu isn't available until I create a project, I created a new empty project. I then turned on CPU monitoring for that new project. That seemed to work, but even with a new empty project the app got sluggish and then hung again. I can provide the CPU capture I was able to grab if that would be helpful, but because I had to "Force Quit" the app I'm not sure if it will provide the information you need. It is 24MB in size and I will send it if you would like.

In the process of trying to enable CPU profiling, I noticed that the links that you've provided for raising the memory allocation and the one I've found for enabling CPU profiling suggest that on a Mac I should be copying a .vmoptions file from its original location into the preferences folder, and then modifying that copy. But in my installation there was no .vmoptions file in the app distribution. There was nothing to copy from, so whatever options are supposed to be defined in that file were not being defined there.

At this point I suspected that something was wrong with my app installation. So I re-downloaded a full AppCode 3.1.3 from the JetBrains web site and installed it clean. I looked inside the app bundle and confirmed that it did include an appcode.vmoptions file. Once I started with this clean download, everything worked fine. So there was obviously something wrong with the contents of my app bundle.

I had never gone into the app bundle and modified anything before this problem started happening. So somehow, the patch done from within AppCode 3.1.2 corrupted the contents of the app bundle. The missing appcode.vmoptions file was an obvious difference. I don't know if there were any other changes made. I saved a copy of that app bundle if the people at JB wanted to look into this problem in more depth.

-Tim

Hi Tim.

Anna

I think you are misunderstanding the details here. I actually DID use AppCode | Check for Updates. It found an update, and it installed the patch. It was the process of installing that patch that somehow corrupted my installation. I only started manually changing files while attempting to recover from the problems that applying the patch had created.

So downloading the full application installation was the only way to correct the problem AFTER the patch had already introduced the problem. Clearly there was something about the state of my application that caused the patching to fail and to corrupt my installation.