How often does FreeCAD crash

[martin51]

I'm a CAD newbie but I'm enjoying using FreeCAD and starting to appreciate the power of parametric modeling. I realize FreeCAD is still early in its development but I'm wondering how often other users experience a crash as pretty much every session I have ends that way. I'm guessing it could be something I'm doing, something unique to my system, or something everyone experiences. Any thoughts?

OS: macOS 10.15
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.18.16146 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: (HEAD detached at 0.18.4)
Hash: 980bf9060e28555fecd9e3462f68ca74007b70f8
Python version: 3.6.7
Qt version: 5.6.2
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: English/UnitedStates (en_US)

[vocx]

... Any thoughts?

It doesn't crash a lot if you don't use a lot of boolean operations. Boolean operations come from the internal OCCT libraries; these are things like fillets and dress-up operations. If you constantly apply these things, and then go back, and delete previous features, and apply again, you may find yourself in some inconsistent states.

The reason is OCCT doesn't like some operations like booleans with coplanar faces, or tangent edges from different bodies. So, in this cases it may return errors. Ideally FreeCAD should "trap" those errors and not let the program actually crash, but occasionally these problems escape detection.

Still, it doesn't crash much in general. And yes, sometimes it is system related, like your OCCT version, or Qt libraries, are too old, or your graphics card causes problems, etc. In general, FreeCAD works best in Linux, that's for certain, as Windows and MacOS have their own quirks.

And FreeCAD isn't in its "early states" of development. I'm not sure what gave you that idea. It has a history that traces back to around 2001, so almost 20 years. The old history is before 2006 when CVS was used. Then from 2006 to 2011 it used SVN, and the modern history so to speak is from 2011 to the present day that the project has been using Git. It has developed a lot in the last five years or so, that's for certain.

[martin51]

Your comment about Boolean operators and situations where features have been deleted and reapplied makes a lot of sense since that's sort of thing I often end up doing when something doesn't work out as expected which, as a someone with no previous CAD experience, happens quite often.

Thanks for the primer on FreeCAD development. As far as the "early state" of development comment goes that was an assumption on my part of where FreeCAD is at based on its version number. It's an extremely impressive application and my hat is off to all the developers involved and the community of supporters on this forum.

[chrisb]

I use the development version on MacOS. FreeCAD crashes here at most once a month, probably less the every two months. It survives without any issues stand by modes of the computer or running several instances at once.
FreeCAD can autosave e.g. every few minutes, so that you don't loose much work in the rare case of a crash.

[carlopav]

That's also my impression: 0.19 seems far more stable than 0.18... I use it on win7 and 10.

[wieszak17]

The "good" things is: random crashes are extremaly unlikely. You will quickly learn which few of operations are a bit risky and when it is wise to save project before try them.

[wmayer]

And FreeCAD isn't in its "early states" of development. I'm not sure what gave you that idea. It has a history that traces back to around 2001, so almost 20 years. The old history is before 2006 when CVS was used. Then from 2006 to 2011 it used SVN, and the modern history so to speak is from 2011 to the present day that the project has been using Git. It has developed a lot in the last five years or so, that's for certain.

In another topic it is discussed how to migrate the old CVS and SVN repos to git. By luck I found out that the CVS repo is still publicly accessible (but the SVN apparently not) and there I could see that the initial commit was done on Monday, 18 March 2002 at 16.12.12.
However, FreeCAD has been developed for a year or longer by the project founder before it has been released to the public.

[fcaduser]

I'm now a heavy user (0.19) and I can state that crashes are totally anecdotal. (I use Part for modeling, with essentially boolean operations under the hood.)

[Zolko]

I'm now a heavy user (0.19) and I can state that crashes are totally anecdotal.

I confirm, FreeCAD v0.19 has become very very stable. Big thank-you to the developers.

[drmacro]

I'm a CAD newbie but I'm enjoying using FreeCAD and starting to appreciate the power of parametric modeling. I realize FreeCAD is still early in its development but I'm wondering how often other users experience a crash as pretty much every session I have ends that way. I'm guessing it could be something I'm doing, something unique to my system, or something everyone experiences. Any thoughts?

I've used 0.19 for almost a year. I use Part and Part Design workbench heavily. I actually can't remember the last crash...they do happen occasionally.
(Though the Linux kernel probably has little to do with it, I'm probably one of few who use it on the preemptive/real-time kernel, so combined with graphic driver/card things that could cause problems...I've none.)

I've used it exclusively on Linux, so can't speak about windoze or fruit products.




OS: Ubuntu 19.10 (XFCE/ubuntustudio)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.
Build type: Release
Branch: unknown
Hash: 30dcafc590fb5051d8a7ed99dce21125ad5d6439
Python version: 3.7.5
Qt version: 5.12.4
Coin version: 4.0.0a
OCC version: 7.3.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)