PCBnew: Kicad crashes and corrupts save file

[Madeliene Kattman]

Currently using:

r14012.dd938b02d-1

While routing a differential pair, the current version of kicad froze, and I got a dialog box saying that the application was not responding, and giving me an option to termination the application or wait longer.

I selected wait longer, and then tried to save the pcb. After the status bar said, "wrote to file", I terminated the application.

When I started kicad again, I was not able to open the layout file; I got an error saying:

"Expecting "xy" in input/source
"path-to-file"
line 388395, offset 1

Thankfully, I only lost 15min of work. I've reverted to an earlier version of kicad (r13750.044b4a6d4-1), which never did this.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Hi Madeliene-

Thank you for the bug report. I assume that this was running MS Windows?

Could you copy the full KiCad version information from Help->About KiCad->Copy Version Information and paste it into this bug report?

Also, do you still have a copy of the invalid file that was saved? If so, would you be able to share it in this bug report (or via direct e-mail if the file is confidential)?

[Victor W (vicw)]

Dear Seth;

This problem was found running the following kicad version:

Application: Pcbnew
Version: (5.99.0-104-g2b387f4b4), release build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.64.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1b zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.1.1 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.1.1) libssh2/1.8.1 nghttp2/1.36.0
Platform: Linux 5.0.9-arch1-1-ARCH x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 2.24
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.64.1
    Compiler: GCC 8.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

@Madeliene and @Victor- In lp:1843092 Victor mentioned that slowdowns happened ~every 20 min. It sounds like this may be related (or same). Can you say what you have the autosave settings at?

[Victor W (vicw)]

Dear Seth,

It looks like the two are related; as noted in the earlier comment, when we reduced the auto-save time to 5min, the time for this issue to become visible also increased.

I that something occurred while it was trying to save, which subsequently caused the program to exit and the save to become corrupted.

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Hi Victor- Thanks for the update. I see the issue. Looking at possible solutions. Should have a fix this week.

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

Fixed in revision 72da23725ad76453d4fac54de236f0d0baa7c2bb
https://git.launchpad.net/kicad/patch/?id=72da23725ad76453d4fac54de236f0d0baa7c2bb