RapidWeaver 6 and hot running fan (OS X 10.10 and 10.11)

Hi folks,
I"m a long-time RapidWeaver user, but have noticed that with Yosemite and El Capitan on multiple machines that the fans start running immediately after opening RapidWeaver. This is true on a recent vintage Macbook Pro 15" rent with 16 Gb or RAM and with a mac mini with 16 Gb RAM, so I doubt it’s a RAM issue. Any ideas would be very welcome…

Hi @jdhardin, I’m running RW 6.3.6 on a mid-2011 mac-mini (2.5GHz i5) with 16gb ram using OSX 10.11.1 and no issues with fan here. (Lots of Plugins, themes and stacks installed, largest site is 30 pages that I open).

I also have the following apps open at the same time:
Transmit
DropBox
1Password
Safari
Mail
Calendar
Finder
and Notes

I know it does nothing for you, but it might be a comparison…

Brad

What kind of resources does Activity Monitor show RW to be using for you?

Sometimes very high %CPU and RAM. In addition, routinely I have to force quit RW on both machines. I wonder if the upgrade created some sort of preferences file corruption or the like?

Hi Brad, Similar to me. I have Adobe CC 2015/Acrobat running at times as well. Nothing seemingly out of th ordinary. It is definitely related to RW, however. After a force quit the fan spends down after 1-2 minutes.

@jdhardin

Probably a stupid question, but have you tried a restart on your mac(s) and just running RW to see if you have the same issue?

Another stupid question, all your plugins, stacks and themes are updated and none of your project resources are on a network drive?

Just throwing thoughts out there

Brad

Not stupid questions! No network drives. Restarts don’t help. It may be I have an old theme that is the problem, but there appears to be no easy way to do a goal compatibility check, is there?

Not sure, I think you’re gonna need help from @nikf. I’ve invited him to the thread.

Waterfall checks some themes for updates but not all developers support it. RW 7 may include an auto check for theme updates as well as all the other plugins.

He will need to know RW version, Stacks Version.

Best of luck, sorry I couldn’t be of more assistance.
Brad

Sorry to hear that you’re having these problems. To help isolate the cause, please could you launch RapidWeaver while holding the Option key. Then ensure that third-party plugins are not loaded.

Does this still happen?

—Nik

Hi Nik,
I’d tried running RW base install on a third machine with no issues, so I"d narrowed it down to this as well, but I didn’t know about this feature; very helpful for troubleshooting!

Option key -> unchecking “Themes” prevents overheating and inability to quit. Changing to a new responsive theme (like the one from Nick Cates Design that comes with RW6) and running for some time doesn’t rigger the bad behaviors. This narrows it down to old/corrupted themes vs. a plugin.

I’ll add back the themes I need one by one and see what happens. A couple of my projects use customized versions of old themes: Shadows and Alpha. Anything known about these?

Thanks for the help to everyone!

Update: Hmm…Adding back one theme without holding down the option key causes overheating and inability to quit. Option key - > unchecking plugins prevents this. Seems like it’s something that loads when the Option Key is not held down? I need Stacks and Blocks, so need plugins…

Further update: I removed the /Library/Containers/RapidWeaver/ and relaunched; still had the problem. I then put everything back and held the option key down, but left both “Themes” and “Plugins” checked, and it launches without fan issues and quits. Weird…

Very odd. If you’re able to isolate the cause, and drop us a note (support@realmacsoftware.com) we’ll get it looked at!

—N

Thanks! I’ll try reinstalling the app from scratch. Any ideas about what to delete for a full wipe (esp. pref files, etc.)?

Reinstalling a fresh copy of the app didn’t solve it. Holding down Option on start and checking “Themes” and “Plugins” works routinely, however…

When this happens, could you:

  1. Launch the “Activity Monitor” app, filter by “RapidWeaver” and choose “Sample Process”.
  2. Save the output from Activity Monitor, and send it to support@realmacsoftware.com (with the subject line “FAO Nik: RapidWeaver Sample”) so I can take a look?

Thanks!

—Nik