Macintosh

Hello. I've added a post to another thread about this but felt it is important enough to start a new thread to help others who may have suffered the same issues that I have (constant crashes on the Mac client while playing Eve). Please report your findings after following these steps and include any ways you have also increased the intervals between crashes. I will update this top post and organize all the tips over time.

Why does it happen?
I believe the crashes involve a number of memory leaks specific to the Mac client. My evidence:
-Crashes as reported by others are consistently based on time and activity (e.g., entering a station, warping to a new location, engaging in combat). This suggests a memory issue.
-Those with higher ram tend to have longer intervals between crashes.
-Some settings cause more frequent crashes.

Here are some ways you can maximize your play time before the client crashes. I want to stress that there is nothing you can do to avoid a crash, if the memory leak exists all we can do is attempt to minimize how much system resources we waste before we run into one of the leaks. However, if you follow these tips you should be able to get a good 4-8 hours of playtime before a crash.

How can I increase play time?
#1 Avoid using the captain's quarters. This is a memory intensive feature. Switch to using hanger view instead.
#2 Do not "cache" system memory. I believed this to help, but noticed more frequent crashes with this setting on.
#3 Limit the number of in-game windows you have open.
#4 Upgrade your ram. For about $80 bucks you can double your memory. I used Other World Computing (U.S.).
#5 Close and quit background programs on your Mac desktop. This includes programs as mundane as Mail and Safari.

Following these steps, my crash rate went down from almost once an hour to roughly once a day (without restarts). This is the best we can do until the memory leaks are found and fixed by CCP. Though I plan to install Eve via Bootcamp if CCP continues to ignore these complaints.

System specs on my iMac:
3.2 Ghz Intel Core i3
8 GB of 1333 MHz DDR3
ATI Radeon HD 5670 512 MB

Very interesting.

The biggest differences between us are card manufacturers (many games can run well with one card and horribly on the other even though both share the same 'specs', Age of Conan is an example) and processor speed.

Are any of your characters in the rookie chat?
Do you run all 3 clients with "default" settings or did you tweak them for performance?
What region of space do you fly in?
Do you use captain quarters or just hanger?

I made a mistake. I believe the actual wording is "Resource cache" it is close to the top on the right-most column within the Esc menu. I believe it is turned off by default, but some people (I know I did) may have turned it on believing it would improve performance.

In my experience, it led to a few more lockups and crashes.

I hope this helps you.

Great tip. I used this to help optimize running two clients at once and didn't crash at all last night once everything was in order.

It must be an issue with the way the client handles the captains quarters then. I was fine yesterday until one of my settings reset by mistake and threw me back into the quarters. I crashed a few minutes later. As long as I use the hanger I don't seem to crash.

Could you try and use the captains quarters and see if you can produce a crash? Should cause a lock up after docking and undocking several times over the course of your trip.

Perhaps your patience is preventing any problems. I know I sometimes unintentionally click some options more than once due to the 20 sec delay. I'd like to get more feedback from others and see if they have CQ enabled when they crash.

Perhaps there is an optimizing issue in how the client handles loading it up.

Thanks again for your feedback, it helps us narrow down the cause of our issues.