Over the last week or so, certainly in the week since I’ve been back from vacation, I’ve had an unusually high number incidents of OBS crashing during the stream. I also had one case where my entire system froze and rebooted. In all these cases, I neglected to note the exact time and didn’t gather crash logs.
It’s unusual because in the year and a half since I’ve had this computer, I’ve broadcasted on twitch just about every day for about three hours each time, and I’ve even done a few 24 hour marathons and haven’t had any crashes whatsoever. A bunch of crash incidents in a week’s time has really caught my eye.
Now, I’m an odd-ball and my setup is unusual: I play on an Xbox One X and I stream from a 2018 MacBook Pro running OS X 10.15.3 via OBS version 24.0.6. But like I said, this setup has been rock solid for a long time.
I’ve got three theories for the crashes:
It could have something to do with the latest versions of OS X and OBS not playing nice. It’s happened before. Late last year for about 4 months I couldn’t click on the OBS icon without it instantly crashing if a camera was plugged in. The only way I could run OBS and keep streaming was by running it via the command line. I also found out that OBS will crash if I attempt to use 1Password in Safari. Something to do with both programs using macros.
It might be that my hardware is just wearing out. Generally speaking, the MacBookPro runs at about 175F with 45-60% processor utilization while I stream. Since I do this every day for three hours at a shot, it may just be that all that heat over time may be wearing out the hardware insides of this thing. I have no idea how to tell if this is the case, but I still have to wonder.
About a week or so before I left for vacation, I installed Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and Bridge. We’re back to using Adobe for our photography studio (it’s a long story). When these programs are installed, there’s all kinds of supporting software that’s also installed and running all the time, like Creative Cloud and all kinds of various bits of whatnot that run to make sure I’m properly licensed, everything is synced with the cloud and so forth. Who the hell knows how adding all the Adobe stuff to the already complicated relationship between OS X and OBS might screw things up?
I began the troubleshooting process yesterday in earnest by removing a bunch of installed applications that I never or rarely use, along with Chrome and Firefox just to be safe. Then I uninstalled all the Adobe apps, then ran everything in CleanMyMac to square things away. Finally I rebooted, made sure everything was running ok, then shut the system down completely. I then fired it up and streamed on Sunday afternoon from about Noon to 4pm.
During my test stream, the only thing that crashed was Battlefield V itself. No crashes during my regular 6:30pm - 9pm evening stream either.
This was only one session with Adobe stuff uninstalled. And while it’ll suck if Adobe is the culprit, it’s not nearly as bad as if the problem is with OS X and OBS or a hardware problem.
And I really don’t want it to be a hardware problem. Look, I’m a Mac guy through and through. Apple is planning on using their own ARM chips instead of Intel in their next generation of Macs starting in 2021. I really don’t want to have to get a new Mac before then, so this one really needs to last for awhile longer.