Fusion crashing constantly

[Anonymous]

Fusion 360 seems to crash consistently on certain designs, and I have no idea why. Usually it will crash when opening the design, sometimes while saving, and sometimes just randomly.

Occasionally, when Fusion crashes on opening the design, that design will never open again (Fusion will crash every time). Nothing to do in that case but delete the design and start again.

Crashing also happens when I click the "Update All" button to update linked components.

How can I troubleshoot this?

Logs attached. (Can't attache the f3z because the forum won't let me)

[HughesTooling]

If you add the fz3 to a zip file you should be able to attach it.

Mark

[Phil.E]

@Anonymous 

Sorry to hear your troubles, I see your CER history and have some advice and a couple questions.

First, thanks for sending in all those CER reports. About half of all of your reports are the same crash and it's a graphics crash. Can you collect your graphics diagnostic information and paste it here? Found on the Help menu, under Support and Diagnostics.

I also noticed that you mentioned closing the app and forcing a save. There is a known issue with this right now, it is recommended that you use the Save button to capture the value of the work you are doing. Regardless, the designs that are saved in this process will 100% of the time finish their save if you restart Fusion. It sounds like you are deleting them instead. 

Which brings me to another thing you may not know. Fusion stores versions of your designs each time you use the Save button. So if you find that one of them "crashes on open" or seems wrong in any way, you can find the last saved version and open it to continue your work. At this point I'm not sure how many of your failed designs are simply incomplete saves as described above that would open normally if you gave them time to save once you return to Fusion, but perhaps you can let us know what you find.

Regarding designs that crash on open, please just use Share Public Link from the File menu. Paste the link here and allow downloading when you create the link.

Thanks, let's figure out what's going on with Fusion and you. Your experience is not normal nor is it unfixable. Starting with graphics, which should get you 50% less crashing right away.

Regards,

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much for getting back to me! For the designs that refuse to open, I've tried going back to open previous versions, and those all crash Fusion as well. Two things that I've done recently that seem to help reduce the frequency of crashes: Turn down graphic "Effects" (turn off anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, object shadow, etc), and replace large numbers of rigid joints with a smaller number of rigid groups. I do't know if these are actually helping, but I seem to be crashing less often.

With regards to sharing the design (by selecting "Share Public Link"), I think I need to actually open the design in order to share the link. Since these designs won't open, they can't be shared? 

Graphics information:

[GPU Information]
GPU Device: AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20
GPU RAM: 4080 MB
GPU Driver API: OpenGL Core Profile

[Graphics Effects Settings]
Use high-resolution graphics: Off
Anti Aliasing: Off
Ambient Occlusion: Off
Object Shadow: Off
Ground Shadow: On
Ground Reflection: Off
Selection Display Style: Normal
Transparency Effect: Better Performance

[Limit effects to optimize performance]
Off

[Phil.E]

It's good to know that turning "down" the effects pressure has reduced your crashing. Your crash history backs this up. Other things you can try for graphics: don't overburden the video by having a lot of apps open, especially video heavy things like games and streaming. 

For the link: Try this, click the project name to see the web view of your data.

This is one way to see the online view

Next, find the file and get a share link.

This may not work because 'crash on open' for you could be 'crash on translate/download' for the sharing workflow.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Thanks!

Turning down the graphics has definitely helped reduce the crashing (though made Fusion harder to work with. I never realized how much that "glow" effect was helpful for selecting edges in the design).

But fusion still crashes constantly. I also that I was able to reduce this further by disabling ALL of the add-ins that were set to run on startup.

So now that crashes are almost under control, Fusion will more often just lock-up (infinite spinning beachball with 100% CPU), but that's easier to deal with.

[Phil.E]

It looks like you were using addins that do not play well in the new UI framework. We've done all we can to identify cases of this, but obviously there may still be some.

You could try adding them back in, one at a time, until the crashing happens. Download new ones in case the author has updated it lately to support the new UI.

After that, let us know which addins are not working well and we can try to accommodate them or notify the author with suggestions to make it work again.

[Anonymous]

The only Add-ins I had enabled were the ones that ship with Fusion 360, and are enabled by default. To whit:

- 100KGarages

- FusionProductionAddIn

- MakeTime

- parts4cad

- Proto Labs

Since I don't know what any of these do, disabling them all hasn't really impacted me (other than correlating with improved stability).

[Anonymous]

After taking notes over the last couple of days, here are some other things that seem to correlate to crashes:

- Opening a design that "worked just fine yesterday". Seems to be related to the complexity of the design (simple designs with a single body and no included components tend to crash much less often).

- Trying to exit fusion (this is actually 50/50 between crashing, or going into "infinite spinner" mode with 100% CPU).

- Changing tabs to another open design.

- Zooming in or out.

- Inserting a component (I haven't managed to narrow this down to a specific component yet. Seems to happen randomly).

- Creating joints or rigid groups, or inserting a component with joints or rigid groups.

- Editing or creating a sketch, or closing a sketch.

[Phil.E]

Thanks for the details.

There are zero known crashes related to the default add-ins. I was thinking it might be one of the few that need updating, but that's clearly not the case.

Looking at your crashes (thanks for sending the reports) you tend to crash in the same areas over and over, doing the same things that crash repeatedly. That explains a lot of your experience of "crashing constantly".

For instance, you crashed several times in a row trying to drive a revolute joint. If it crashes the first time, might be "random", but after two times doing the same steps and getting the same result, it's time for different action.

First, if you can share the model, post a link to it here and give instructions. "Open model, drive revolute joint X, Fusion will crash". That kind of report helps me get a reproducible case for the developers who can debug it. If you can't share a public link for the model, send me a PM. In this way you can help yourself and all other customers in the same situation by helping find and fix these problems.

Regarding the revolute joint, did you try deleting it and replacing it? Just curious if you found a workaround after so many attempts to drive the joint.

I also see a bunch of recent force quit crashes. Those can be tricky. Sometimes Fusion is doing perfectly expected things while the beach ball is showing, such as computing the design, or opening a design. Please give it extra time if you find yourself repeating the same actions over and over and getting the same beachball freeze. If you think a design will not open at all, share the public link. Many times these can be downloaded and debugged.

All this is said to say thanks for paying close attention and for your help. Let's figure out what's going on with your crashes before you feel like it's crashing "all the time" over just a couple issues. The list you provided is literally the list of #1 workflows for all Fusion customers. If any percentage of people using Fusion crashed as repeatedly as you do in those workflows we would have alarms going off over here.

Glad you took the time to list it all out, now let's narrow it down by exploiting the obviously reproducible cases you seem to find.

Thanks,

[Anonymous]

Hi @Phil.E , thanks for your response! I'll try to keep closer tabs on this, and post specific designs and repro steps in the future. I've added you to the project that has been giving me the most grief, so hopefully that will help me point you at the specific designs causing problems.

I don't recall "Driving a revolute joint" to be any more likely to cause a crash than any other source, but my data is anecdotal, and yours is statistical, so I believe you :-). I do have some chain-reaction motion links defined. Maybe those are causing a problem.

(Now if I can find that revolute joint you're talking about...)

[Phil.E]

I'm pretty sure these are your comments, you crashed several times in a row on Saturday driving a revolute joint. I'm just trying to tell you that you don't have a problem that would be characterized as "constantly crashing", or that its found in broad swathes of your Fusion experience. You are mostly crashing in very narrow workflows (repeatedly) and due to very specific hardware problems.

Glad to help find out what's going on, just trying to be clear with you so we can talk apples and apples here, which will lead to a quicker and better solution to any of these issues. The good news is that if you can find something like you found below, surely I could also reproduce the crash, and thus speed this along to fixing all the sooner.

Comments about driving joints

[Anonymous]

Yes, I'm not saying I don't believe you or something, those are definitely my comments :-).

But this is a cherry-pick of six (out of dozens of) crashes. Unless if by "broad swath", you're referring to the many other sources of crashes that I outlined above? Not sure what I should do. Should I... stop using revolute joints?

Also not sure what you mean by "specific hardware problems". I've dialed back the graphics as far as Fusion will let me, and experienced these crashes on multiple different computers. What can I do to eliminate this as a potential variable?

[Anonymous]

Exciting new crash! Last time I opened Fusion (not a design, mind you, just launching the program), it crashed my whole OS (I got one of those "Your computer has restarted due to a problem", white text on a black screen). This is so rare (an app crashing the whole OS) that I had forgotten it was even a thing any more.

This is the one and only time this has happened, so not super important. I just thought it was interesting.

[Anonymous]

Adding some hardware stuff here, in case it matters:

===

  Model Name: MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier: MacBookPro15,3

  Processor Name: Intel Core i9

  Processor Speed: 2.9 GHz

  Number of Processors: 1

  Total Number of Cores: 6

  L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

  L3 Cache: 12 MB

  Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

  Memory: 32 GB

Radeon Pro Vega 20:

  Chipset Model: Radeon Pro Vega 20

  Type: GPU

  Bus: PCIe

  PCIe Lane Width: x16

  VRAM (Total): 4 GB

  Vendor: AMD (0x1002)

  Device ID: 0x69af

  Revision ID: 0x00c0

  ROM Revision: 113-D2060I-087

  VBIOS Version: 113-D20601MA0T-016

  Option ROM Version: 113-D20601MA0T-016

  EFI Driver Version: 01.01.087

  Automatic Graphics Switching: Supported

  gMux Version: 5.0.0

  Metal: Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily2 v1

  Displays:

Color LCD:

  Display Type: Built-In Retina LCD

  Resolution: 2880 x 1800 Retina

  Framebuffer Depth: 24-Bit Color (ARGB8888)

  Main Display: Yes

  Mirror: Off

  Online: Yes

  Rotation: Supported

  Automatically Adjust Brightness: No

[Anonymous]

Played around a bunch with the various graphics settings in Fusion, including dialing them back to whatever "maximum" settings I could find and enabling all effects (Ground shadow, ambient occlusion, reflections, transparency, etc.). This is purely anecdotal, but I didn't see any crashes while doing the usual design work. I also haven't tried to drive any revolute joints (see my other more recent post for details on that), so the graphics are a red herring? Any way to be sure?