bug?

I have a mid 2011 imac, osx 10.13.6. running Dorico 3.1.10

Just in the last few days (since an osx security update maybe?) Dorico has been acting weird. More specifically the window goes blank and I have to run my cursor over the window to get each little icon to reappear. I’m attaching a screenshot and what I hope is a diagnostic report. I’m not sure I did it correctly.Thanks so much for any help you can give.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (435 KB)

We do occasionally see this kind of redraw problem, but normally only in unusual circumstances like connecting or disconnecting a display with a very different resolution to that of the built-in display, which I’m guessing isn’t the case with your iMac. Unfortunately there aren’t any settings in Dorico itself that you can change that would influence this.

Under what circumstances does the window go blank for you?

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I can’t really pinpoint when it happens. it just happens. I’ve tried closing all apps. Restarting. etc. I’ll keep going and if see I can figure something out. I hope its not my trusty old imac getting too old.

It seems to be happening if I’m switching between apps. For example, I’m going back and forth between listening on an audio app and then transcribing to Dorico. Does that make sense? It doesn’t happen everytime though.

I spend literally all day switching between Dorico and other applications on my Mac, and I basically never see this; as I say, the only time I’ve ever seen it is when changing the display while Dorico is running, and even then I can count the number of times I’ve seen it on the fingers of one hand. So I think there must be a bit more to it than that. Perhaps you could try capturing it in the act with a screen recording from QuickTime Player?

So do I! I tried shutting down my computer overnight. (Usually I just put it to sleep). Since I turned it back on it seems to be fine. Usually it would happen almost immediately. Daniel, thanks for being attentive to my problem. I won’t bug you again unless I have video proof!

OK. It started happening again.

Link to screen capture video: Dropbox - File Deleted

Is it possible my computer is too old?

Its happening pretty regularly again.

When it happens, if you do Command-H to hide the whole window and then click the icon in the Dock to show it again, does that cause the whole window to redraw completely?

How much RAM does your Mac have? Perhaps you could attach a Mac system report (go to the Apple menu, click About this Mac, then click ‘System Report…’, save the resulting file and zip it up in order to attach it here).

20 GB RAM. Zip file attached.

Will try the control-H thing when I it starts happening.

Thanks
iMac.zip (325 KB)

Thanks for sending that in, Matt. Everything in there looks reasonably normal, and there’s nothing that particularly leaps out at me. If you reboot your Mac, does the problem seem to occur right away as soon as you start using Dorico, or does it take a while before it starts going wrong?

takes a while. Long enough to convince me its gone, then it starts again.

command-H does not trigger a redraw. tried it with multiple Dorico windows open, and some other applications as well.

So if you hide the window to the Dock, then make it appear again from the Dock, it still doesn’t redraw?

If you quit and restart Dorico, does that repair the issue? If so, for how long?

I think I was misunderstanding the terminology AND your instructions. I was thinking of “redraw” as when the window goes blank and I have to run my cursor over the whole thing to get it back.

I was trying to see if command-H triggered the bug. That’s what I was reporting in my post above.

Now I understand you want me to try command-H the next time the bug occurs (window going blank) to see if hiding and then bringing back the window using the dock actually redraws the window (without me using the cursor to bring it back)
Am I correct?

I’ll report back when I do that. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

OK. Dorico window goes blank. I press cmd-H and it hides. I go down to the dock and click on the Dorico icon. The window appears fully redrawn, ready to go.

So that’s at least something of a workaround, for the time being. When you have a chance to keep track of whether the problem is particularly likely to appear if your Mac has been running for a long time, or if Dorico has been running for a long time, that would be useful.

Yes. It seems to happen when either the mac or Dorico has been on for a long time. Every morning I think its gone. Every evening it seems to come creeping back.

We’re reasonably sure that Dorico has no serious memory or resource leaks (this is something we specifically test for and have tools to help us find), plus this is not a commonly-reported problem among other users who run Dorico for long periods of time, so my suspicion would be that perhaps another application you are running on your Mac is exhausting the resources on your computer. I wonder whether you can detect any commonalities in which applications are running at the same time as Dorico.

Got it. Maybe I’ll keep the activity monitor and see if I notice anything. Thanks and will keep you posted.

Hi Daniel. I haven’t been doing too much Dorico-izing the last few days but the problem is still there some of the time. Seems like VST Audio Engine and coreaudiod are at the top of the activity monitor when it happens, but actually VST Audio Engine is up there most of the time, even when Dorico is in the background, as it is right now, usually taking up around 9.5% of the CPU. As you can tell, these observations are subject to many inaccuracies, but I’m hoping they can help somehow. Thanks!