UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

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howiec
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UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

Post by howiec »

When a lot of docs are open (admittedly, way too many) expanding/unhiding the ribbon & some other interactions causes the UI / renderer to stop updating (unusable) & potentially fully crash the editor.

This may also happen more often when a at least one of the open documents is very large/long.

Usually the entire window stops updating/responding but sometimes some UI elements/areas stop updating too (see example below).

However, using a hotkey to close the active document (e.g., CTRL + W) can sometimes restore the UI temporarily until it happens again shortly after to the next document.

Is there some sort of limit / memory setting that could be increased to avoid this issue?
(PC has 32GB RAM & plenty available. Editor's memory management set to Auto)

image.png

Thanks,
Howie
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Daniel - PDF-XChange
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Re: UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

Post by Daniel - PDF-XChange »

Hello, howiec

Before we start, is this happening in the current latest release (10.6.0.396)? If you are running an older build, please first update and see if the issue persists. Assuming it does remain in the current version, please see below:

Since you mentioned that sometimes it full crashes the editor, and sometimes it seems to simply "hang", or cause the UI to stop rendering, I will need to ask for both:
1. A Crash Dump (these are created automatically in the current release, and will be located here:
  • %localappdata%\CrashDumps\PDFX
2. A Process dump the next time that the Rendering stops, but the app has not yet "full crashed" Once you have both of those, please place them in a zip file, and upload them here:
https://files.pdf-xchange.com/s/Xrmg6tisNHkJRS9
(Link will expire in a few days, let me know if you need more time)

Let me know when the upload is complete, and I will then send them up to the Dev team for review. Hopefully this shows us what the cause is and helps to identify a solution.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
PDF-XChange Co. LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
howiec
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Re: UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

Post by howiec »

Daniel - PDF-XChange wrote: Wed Jun 18, 2025 10:21 pm Before we start, is this happening in the current latest release (10.6.0.396)?
[...]
1. A Crash Dump
[...]
2. A Process dump the next time that the Rendering stops, but the app has not yet "full crashed"
[...]
Hopefully this shows us what the cause is and helps to identify a solution.
Hi Daniel,

I can reproduce the issue very consistently & would totally send the ~2.5GB crash/process dumps but am unfortunately not allowed to do so due to the confidential & proprietary info/data of the .PDFs that are likely contained there.

As I was trying to reproduce the issue, once I closed a significant percentage of documents & editor windows, the "bug" did not manifest, so it seems extremely likely that it's some sort of UI/renderer-related memory/cache limit issue (or something along those lines).

Would you be able to forward at least that to the dev(s)?

It should be pretty straightforward for them to open multiple, large .PDFs in multiple editor windows & then try to toggle hiding/unhiding the ribbon, etc.

In the meantime, I'll see if I can reproduce the issue with non-sensitive .PDFs.

Thanks,
Howie
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Daniel - PDF-XChange
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Re: UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

Post by Daniel - PDF-XChange »

Hello, howiec

I have passed along the report already, but so far our tests have been unsuccessful. The actual number of unique "heavy" files we keep on hand is rather small (we don't often need to work with them personally, beyond throwaway cases where due to contained user data or other security policies, we need to destroy sample files after addressing the issue).

We will keep trying and see what we can do, but if you manage to reproduce the crash with your non-sensitive files, it would be great to see the crash dump that results from that.

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
PDF-XChange Co. LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
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Daniel - PDF-XChange
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Re: UI / Rendering - App Crashes / Stops responding

Post by Daniel - PDF-XChange »

Hello,

A quick followup:
First, The dev team noticed the vague wording used in your initial post "potentially crash", and we wanted to confirm, does your Editor fully crash (close without warning or error messages) on its own, or has the situation so far only been hanging, and you manually choose to force close the app before any "crash" happens.

Second, Can you tell us more about your environment? what version of windows are you running, is this a x86, x64 or AMR64 windows installation?

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
PDF-XChange Co. LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com