Hi guys,
I have a super weird problem. Every time I run a specific bit of code in the iPhone simulator, my entire Mac freezes: I can't close the simulator, or any other app, and can't open any apps. Worst of all, I can't shut down. I have to force a shut down manually by holding the power button.
I'm running on a 15" MacBook Pro, and the only thing running is Xcode and the iPhone simulator. I used Activity Monitor to shut down any unnecessary apps running in the background. I've also used OnyX to clean up my system.
I'm using Xcode 3.2.4, with iOS 3.2 (iPad simulator).
At first I suspected this was a processor issue - so I ran the same code to induce a crash while I had Activity Monitor running. I can still switch between apps when frozen, I just can't open/close any or do anything with Xcode or the iPhone simulator. Activity Monitor reported that there was plenty of room for more processing, so it can't be that. I'm not running low on system memory. If I've missed anything out that might help in debugging this, leave a comment and I'll find the information. I want to fix this ASAP.
The code in question handles a bunch of timers, 3 background threads and a lot of UDP packets. The background threads are: two UDP receive threads, and a send thread. The background threads run a constant loop, looking for data on two different ports. The send thread runs another constant loop, but only sends data when there is any in its queue. The UDP processing just uses socket(), bind(), sendto(), recvfrom(), and select() calls.
I was under the impression that any problems in the current Xcode project would only become apparent in the iPhone simulator - an over-release only crashes the simulator, etc. How is it possible to crash the OS, not the simulator?
Edit: It runs perfectly fine on a device. Doesn't crash, doesn't report any memory issues, nada.