Fusion 360 on MacOS Big Sur - crashing regularly after April update

[DreadPirateDave]

Product: Fusion 360

Platform: MacBook Pro (2017) 13"/3.5GHz /16G Iris graphics, running MacOS 11.3.1. >100G free disk space. 

Steps to reproduce:

Launch Fusion 360. Wait 15-30mins. Fill in the crash report form... repeat.

I had just started to try to learn Fusion 360 prior to the April update at which point it stopped working. It starts up okay and I get on average 15-30 mins of use then it crashes. This is the same regardless of what I'm currently doing (incl. left idle after restart). Monitoring memory and cpu during execution doesn't reveal anything obvious. As far as I can tell there had been no sudden increase in resource usage before a crash.

I've sent back crash reports but not heard anything in response. I appreciate non-comm users are unlikely to get anything but given it's such a reliable crash. I thought it might be of interest.

I've tried following the KB suggestions: changing graphics accel. options; clean re-install; running as admin user; running in a fresh user account; running with all projects marked as offline - which did seem to increase the length of time (30-120mins) before spontaneous crashes.

I have not tried downgrading the OS (not possible). I routinely use this computer with lot's of other high-load software: SDKs; VirtualBox; KiCad; FreeCAD; Office 360; Photoshop, Blender etc., with little trouble - at least not of the crashing variety 🙂

I'd like to try downgrading to the pre-update version to see if it really was stable - doesn't look like this is an option. I only had a couple of weeks of use before the update and I don't recall it ever crashing.

[Phil.E]

Thanks for sending in the crash reports. These are monitored by automatic means and there's no way to answer each one. At this time we don't know how to debug the crash. It doesn't appear to be related to any specific design.

At this time I have no good answers to prevent the crash. I saw your forum post and wanted you to know someone does eventually see the crash reports and respond when possible. 

[DreadPirateDave]

This morning a MacOS update (11.4) came through. I installed this then re-installed Fusion. I started Fusion and had it sitting doing nothing for well ver an hour. I then loaded a project and did a little work on it and left that in the background. I'm relieved to say that it's still running.

Fingers crossed.

[Phil.E]

Thanks for the update. Please let me know if you think this solves the problem.

[DreadPirateDave]

Sadly not. The post MacOS update behaviour was anomalous. It is still crashing. The degenerate case is I launch Fusion 360, don't load any project, wait... boom! Typically 15-30mins later (although I've now given up after 4 repeats). To be clear... If I leave 360 running it *always* crashes. I'm afraid I've run out of patience with this and will look at other options, probably go back to FreeCAD. Thanks for your attention. 

[Phil.E]

Okay, sorry to hear this. We are working on the root cause of the crash and hope to release a fix. I cannot predict the time frame for this, but obviously we want to fix it sooner rather than later. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I think it's notable that this is not universal for all mac users, or all Big Sur users. This could indicate a clash with other software or perhaps hardware.