Is your Notes 11 client crashing repeatedly? Look at your Chrome settings…

One of our clients reported daily Notes Client crashes for some of their users after upgrading their Notes 9.x clients to 11.0.1 FP3 (and later FP4). We narrowed it down to a certain set of steps that would INTERMITTENTLY result in a crash.

Joe (I will call him Joe, mostly because that is his name but also because he is not the only Joe in this world) would do the following:

1. Edit an existing appointment in his calendar, or another shared calendar

2. Update some text in the description

3. Change the date to a future date

… before he could click “Save and Close” his Notes Client would sometimes crash.

Now, I will say Joe is one of the most patient people I have ever worked with, as this was very frustrating. Since the problem was intermittent, there were multiple iterations of analysis and remedying done, with a period of waiting time to see if the issue reoccurred.

An HCL Support case revealed that due to the presence of core_*.* files in the Support Data collected, there was something happening at the O/S level at the time of the crash. Their analysis also found over 80% of memory was being utilized at the time of the crashes.

What was using up all the memory? Task Manager consistently indicated Chrome was the largest consumer of memory.

After a bit of digging into Google Chrome settings, we found that hardware acceleration can sometimes help performance and sometimes hurt performance. We decided to try changing Joe’s current settings. He had these two settings on, so we turned them off and had him restart his laptop.

The result? It’s been almost 2 weeks and he has had no more Notes Client crashes! Joe is very pleased. His co-workers who had been having the same problem are no longer having Notes Client crashes since their Chrome settings were updated.

Bonus: Did you know that Chrome has its own Task Manager? SHIFT-ESC while in Chrome will show you the Chrome specific details.