Superlab unexpectedly quits

I just got off the phone with one of our RAs. She reported that she and another RA have seen several instances now where after finishing an experiment and writing out the data, they get the Macintosh “Application Superab quit unexpectedly, close report reopen” error message. It doesn’t appear that we’ve lost any data or had any problems mid-experiment, but I am concerned about this.

We’ve been doing some fairly heavy testing, basically continuously from about 10 AM until 6 PM, so I had the theory that maybe thre is a memory leak or other cumulative problem, so I told them to quit Superlab and re-enter the program after every experiment, starting tomorrow. Hopefully, that will stop the problem.

I just realized that as far as I know, they have not been explicitly closing the previous experiment before loading the next one, so maybe Superlab is just getting clogged up with all the previous experiments.

I’m considering setting up the .ini file to cause Superlab to exit after each experiment.

Any comments or suggestions?

Greg Shenaut

The next time this happens, click “report” and then copy the contents and e-mail them to us. This isn’t a problem I’ve seen, and without any information about where or why it’s happening, it would be impossible to fix.

SuperLab is more stable on 10.4 than 10.3. I have come across a few bizarre crash issues on 10.3, but so far, they make no sense–especially since they don’t happen on 10.4. This is just an idea.

Also, it’s not likely a memory leak issue. The only way memory leaks would cause crashes is if SuperLab wound up running into the 4GB barrier of a 32-bit process. If there were memory leaks bad enough to cause this, you would notice LONG before the crash.

Regardless, I’d still like to see the report.