Currently, I am using Crittercism for crash reporting and making sure that I add dSYMs to get symbolicated crash reports.
But it is not helping with some of my crashes which are segmentation faults (SIGSEGV and SIGBUS). They occur randomly and I haven't been able to reproduce them on device and on simulator. I have tried to find a pattern by trying my app on different ios devices with different network connections (3G, Wifi, Edge) but with no success.
What can be my next step?
Not much to go on, but here are a few places to look:
If you have multiple threads, check to make sure they are behaving properly. Make sure you synchronize properly if multiple threads could be accessing the same objects.
Check your NSNotifications - could one be posted when you are not expecting it?
I have found that the hardest bugs to find are those that are caused by asynchronous events - either in other threads or due to external events that you might be monitoring.
Not being able to reproduce the bug in your development environment will make it very hard to find.
Related
I'm developing an iOS framework and I like to be able to log data for posible crashes. I don't like to use external logging framework like Fabric to avoid conflicts with the main app that uses the framework. Which should be the best approach to do that. Can I use the dsym files in any way? Thanks a lot.
If I correctly understand what you're trying to achieve; you'd like to get crash reports from apps which link against your framework however only if they occurred directly as a result of the code provided by the framework?
This would be fairly difficult to achieve, as crashes occur at the process level rather than your framework having its own isolated 'section' or subprocess.
You could potentially catch some Objective-C exceptions by writing code to detect and prevent them from resulting in crashes, however major faults such as EXC_BAD_ACCESS would not be 'detectable' without processing the app's crash logs.
If you decide to analyse the crash logs themselves (e.g. when the app next launches), this would require the dSYM of the specific application and build to symbolicate the crash. Once you've symbolicated the crash, you'd then need some logic to determine if the crash was likely due to your framework or not. If you receive crash reports from multiple apps, you'd need to ensure that you use the correct dSYM for each log, as this will very likely be different for each one.
My app has a bug, which I am unable to replicate when it is run when plugged into the computer.
I see it three times a day and it is quite annoying.
Is there any way to capture the state of the app (when not connected to the computer) and see what's going on? Kind of like what XCode does when you use a breakpoint, but somehow send the data to it (or some order tool that I am unaware of) wirelessly.
UPDATE:
The app does not crash. It's just that certain UITableViewCells don't work as they should at certain times.
Try using Crashlytics its awesome for crashes. You should also use TestFlight which will give you live sessions/logs of your app. These both combined will tell you many things.
I've got a very basic, but terribly important and potentially impossible question: how does one go about diagnosing a bug you can't reproduce?
Twice now, I've gotten emails from people asking about app-crashing bugs that I can't reproduce. Non-modified iPhones, current software, tried reinstalling and hard resets, etc. It crashes every time for them, and it works perfectly for me, (not to mention it got approved for the App Store in the first place so I'm clearly not the only one). I had always understood that the consistency of the devices was one of Apple's big selling points for developers, but that also makes it hard to pinpoint what's different about their device from mine...
So, aside from "just keep testing," is there a trick-of-the-trade among programmers for this sort of thing? Some function of the iPhone simulator that lets you test not just different screen sizes but different hardware configurations, etc? Or am I just out of luck, and stuck telling my customer "sorry, it works for me"?
Can anyone share their experiences or suggestions about this?
You should probably start by installing a crash reporting tool like Crashlytics. This may give you the clues you need or at least help you narrow down where to put additional crash logging.
While the iTunes Connect crash reports can be helpful, the crash reporting services like Crittercism are more user-friendly and full-featured. Crittercism has been very helpful in tracking down infrequently-occurring crashes for my apps and can be used no-charge. (I have no association with Crittercism.)
In iTunes Connect you can access crash reports. These crash reports include call stacks that you can symbolicate and then you can see where it actually crashes.
Here is some good instructions for symbolicating: symbolicating-iphone-app-crash-reports
It's important to keep your dsym files from each build & archive safe. You can use them to symbolicate crash reports, to see details of the crash. Users will have to opt in to submitting crash reports though. I think this is a feature of iTunesConnect.
That probably sounds a lot worse than it is, but here's my question.
I am dealing with a crash on an actual device, that one of my tester's is using. At the moment, there is no way to discover what is causing the crash. I can not reproduce it on the simulator. However, on the simulator when something crashes I get log info about it in the output window. But I don't want to keep testing with the device connected.
Is it possible to log crash exceptions, etc into a file when things crash. I know certain apps can do it, but I am not sure how?
Any info would be appreciated.
There are generally two ways to do that:
Someone get the tester to send you the crash reports, that iOS created on the device. This is usually too tricky for end users, so the next suggestion works better. That's also why I am not describing how to do that :) But you'll find plenty of documentations on that process.
Integrate a crash reporting library, that catches the crashes and allows you to receive them in various ways. You should not implement your own global crash exception handler, things are just too complex to do it right (even though other people will tell you otherwise). Also crashes caused by exceptions are only one type of crashes.
There are multiple open source libraries out there, the safest one to use is anything based on PLCrashReporter. Most others use private or undocumented iOS APIs, or are not async-safe, which basically means those can destroy app data or make the crash even worse. See this blog post about the topic: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/crashreporting/Reliable_Crash_Reporting_1.1.20130119.html
The following linked answer shows some of the available options on how to add logging to your app and also various options on how to receive crash reports for test version and also once the app is released: Including custom data into iOS crash dumps
If you're open to using a third party service, I use https://www.crashlytics.com. Makes debugging crashes from user devices painless.
I know it's a bit weird but I have no code at all to put here, unless I copy all of it.
My project is crashing with no apparent reason. I've read this solution: iPhone application is crashing and not leaving behind a .crash log file
and I'm using Instrument for searching for leaks and other possibilities for those crashes.
Another strange thing is: even when I run my app with debug on XCode, it just stop to work on my IPad but it looks it is still running.
And the last and more strange thing: there's no crash log at all on my device. Before somebody ask, it is enable to record crash logs.
Does anybody have any idea for helping me?
Regards
I've had this happen to me before on various platforms. If its crashing on you, whether its an iPhone app, openGL / DirectX program, try these steps:
Have you tried to undo your last change and get to the point where it last worked?
Have you tried placing a print outputs to the terminal to see how far your program is executing? Start at the beginning and work your way into your program. This is especially useful when there is no crash log.
Also in particular to iPhone apps: Have you checked your xib's? Did you recently re-factor and change the name of a class maybe? You might need to re-link your nib to your classes. This on more than one occasion has caused apps of mine to crash with no error. Hope this helps.
I doubt you are still wondering about this, but my answer is that you were experiencing your app getting killed by the OS due to using too much memory. This will silently fail in the log in my experience when running on the device.
You will have to go into the Organizer to the device console and crash reports that get stored on the device to see the clues.
The reason your crash stopped when you got an iPad 2 is because the iPad 2 has twice the memory of the iPad 1 (which is dramatically under-stocked with RAM)