Why is Bridge CS3 stable & CS4 crashes

Report · Nov 23, 2009

I have 3 flex apps, that run at the same time in 3 flash player script palettes, all called from a javascript, running perfectly fine in Adobe CS3. It never crashes.

I am trying to upgrade it to CS4 and it crashes, at different spots, but all the time. I have tried all the troublshooting tips, to lessen memory, cache, etc., but nothing seems to work. I have tried to change my code to be more sequential, and wait till things are loaded, but that only helps a little.

I noticed that CS3 uses less CPU, and when CS4 does crash it is over 100 CPU on Activity Monitor.\

What are the differences between CS3 and CS4 that makes CS4 so un-stable?

Any suggestions?

thanks, Todd

Report · Jan 12, 2010

Thanks to David Franzen and Team for kindly working through my issues, found a bug in Bridge CS4, and provided a work-around to fix the crashing problems I was having. His reply is below:

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Hi Todd,

I’ve attached a sample script that demonstrates a work-around for the crasher.

The root cause of the crash is a bug in Bridge’s C++ code; a variable was sometimes used before it was initialized. The workaround is to try to make sure that your script only creates tabbed palettes at times when the variable has already been initialized. We believe you can do this reliably by always creating tabbed palettes inside an event handler for Document objects’ “workspacesPreLoad” event.

Because you may not want to show your tabbed palette immediately every time this event fires, the attached sample script also shows how you can create one (or more) hidden tabs in the event handler and show or hide them on-demand.

1. Put the script into the startup scripts folder (bring up the Bridge prefs, go to the Startup Scripts preferences, and click “Reveal Scripts”).
2. Quit and Restart Bridge
3. Click Window->test_create_tab Panel
4. You will see a new tabbed palette named “test_create_tab” with 3 buttons.

The first button “Display Tabs Already Created” shows 4 hidden tabs that were also created.

The second button “Hide Tabs Already Created” will hide the tabs.

The third button “Create New Tab (Crasher)” will create a new tabbed palette every time it’s clicked. This may reproduce the crash since it’s creating the tab outside the context of the event handler when we believe it’s safe.

Please let us know if this works for you!

Thanks,
David