Seems all of a sudden my itouch has started to crash and reboot (and take a long time to reboot) if i try to type anything into the search. I have about 660 apps or so, is this common? i went into settings and told the search to only return results from applications (not music/videos/contacts/blahblah) but since i don't have any of those anyway i don't think it mattered much as it didn't help. anyone know anything about this?
Sounds like a background process or theme is causing you trouble. The fact that it seems like Springboard.app itself is crashing makes me immediately suspect Winterboard. Is your iPod jailbroken? Does it crash at any other time? What have you installed recently? How *many* apps you have is a useless statistic, it's far more important to know what they actually *are*. Also, how exactly is it crashing - does it just freeze up? Are you getting the infamous "springboard has crashed" dialog?
not jailbroken, i wish i had, then at least i wouldn't have to deal with the page limitations. I have only installed games on the thing. i thought the issue might be something with an index being too big for searching but that would have been a pretty stupid limitation to implement. by crash i mean i click the home button to go to search, and as soon as i press any key on the keyboard the screen does a quick change to having some interlaced black lines on the screen and then going black for a second, and coming back with the apple logo, then sitting at the apple logo for up to 5 minutes, going to sleep, being unresponsive to either button pressing before going to sleep, then i can wake it up from sleep like normal and go on with my business as usual, play any game and do anything else, as long as i don't try to search.... it strange. i'll keep experimenting.
the more apps you have installed on your device the more time the ipod will take to boot up. but i would suggest restoring your ipod. and keeping a limited number of apps on your ipod at one time.
To be clear, you still only have 11 pages and are trying to use the search button to find items not on those pages? I used the extra page glitch to put 18 pages on my non jb touch. Of course I only have 300 or so games on my touch. I wonder if it could be a problem from the number of app? Have you tried deleting some and then trying search again?
Right, that sounds like a kernel panic, which is pretty strange. The only time I've ever had a kernel panic on an unjailbroken phone was due to a corrupt app installation, but that was completely different - the crash happened when I tried to run the app, so the cause was fairly obvious. The fix involved deleting the app from both my phone and iTunes, syncing, then redownloading and resyncing. Not sure what the interlaced lines you're seeing are, are you sure it's not some kind of error message that's appearing for half a second? I also doubt that's the case, otherwise other people would have reported it by now. Also, if what you say is correct, then your phone contains less than 1000 items total. I have almost 5 times that in music alone, yet I've never had a crash like that while searching (which definitely would have happened if it was a buffer overrun like you suggest, not to mention it's one of the most basic things apple would have tested for), which suggests the issue is something on your phone. Unfortunately the only thing that comes to mind now is the corrupt app install problem I had a few weeks ago. Can you remember what the last app you installed was before this problem started?
thanks for the info. i keep my itunes emails, so shouldn't be hard to go backwards. fortunately i kept an itunes sync 'image' at work which seemed to work, which is only 20 or so apps smaller than the 'image' i have at home, which is crashing. so i'll redo the system with the work image and add apps individually until i find something. just that the backup/restore process takes almost forever.
I had this issue too and think it can be tied DIRECTLY to overloading the iPhone with a bunch of "off screen" apps. I've had this hit me in two different "levels", as it were. 1) Search crashes on certain search strings: Like if I have too many apps containing "s" and as soon as I start a search and hit the "s" character, KABLAM-REBOOT. 2) Any use of search causes me to crash into recovery mode. The fix for me once this is happening is to start "bailing out the sinking ship" and pairing down my total apps on the device until it stabilizes again (i.e. take a handful of random apps off, check to see if it's better, and if still crashy, go back and dump a few more). Thankfully, once OS 4 hits with the super advanced technology of...FOLDERS (wow, I wonder when desktops will follow up on Apple's innovation here and...oh yeah, this is only some basic crap that has existed since the beginning of personal computers), we can hoard all the apps we want!
my sentiments exactly on the folders... also why i didn't fully discount some stupid oversight for some indexing limitation. right now i'm restoring, probably for the next 3 or 4 hours still. will see how that image works, then maybe try downloading one app at a time and see if it crosses some oops boundry, or if perhaps it was a corrupt install that was screwing things up.
Wait - what LordGek said confused me a little: when you say "reboot", are you rebooting normally, or rebooting into recovery mode?
not sure what 'normally' implies, the screen flashes, during which you see interlaced black lines on the screen, goes black for a second, and then you see the apple logo for a few minutes, then goes to sleep like nothing ever happened. by recovery mode you mean where it shows you the usb cable connect to itunes logo? then no. ...only half way through the restore, can't believe this ****, its been almost 4 hours, whoever came up with that restore routine was an idiot.
I may have used the wrong term but I assume there are at least three levels of reboot. 1) The basic everyday restart reboot. 2) The complete shutdown reboot. 3) The forced automatic reboot from a crash. Each of these take a little longer to comeback from then the previous with that final level there potentially taking several minutes. When you see the USB cable I'm assuming that is a complete wipe/reinstall situation, not really in the realm of straight reboot anymore. How quickly do you expect your dainty little device to reinstall some, I'm assuming, 10+ giggs of stuff?
its 20gigs, but still, we're talking USB2 (even as slow as it is), not USB1. I'm pretty sure i don't recall my 32gb usb stick taking 8 hours to transfer 20gb of data... granted there has to be something 'fancy' going on during the restore process to add SOME acceptable overhead, but come on, are they inspecting each bit to see if its shiny enough or something?
1 isn't a reboot, it's when you take it out of sleep mode. Unless you're talking about something completely different..? 2 and 3 are the same process, only triggered by different things; 2 results from you shutting down your phone normally, while 3 results from a kernel panic. Well that's what recovery mode is, so if you're not seeing that screen, it hasn't booted you into recovery mode. I'm guessing you're getting mixed up with DFU mode, which just a black screen. Though why the hell any crash would put you in DFU mode is beyond me, unless you were unlucky and holding the home button at the wrong rime...then again, with all their weirdness I've heard about 3.1.x, it shouldn't surprise me too much.
definitely not recovery mode, just seems like a crash followed by an quick reboot, as i'm under the impression that the apple logo only shows during a boot process. that's the one that's there for literraly 5 minutes after a crash, i'm guessing its doing some cleanup/db checking due to the improper shutdown.
After some experimenting around, i feel somewhat confident in saying it has something to do with the number of apps that are on my itouch. Obviously not a hard set rule for all devices, but whatever conditions are happening in my device in particular are causing issues if i have more than 580 or so apps running. I uninstalled some and search for fine for about 8 times in a row, could've still crashed on the 9th for all i know though. Tried installing a few more apps directly through the touch and after that it would crash every time. disappointed, not really in the mood to unsync some of the apps, so i'll probably just live with it until the 4.0 folder capable release rolls out in a few months...
Have you gotten it yet where it only crashes on SOME searches? I'm convinced at a certain stage it is all about what letters you're using in your search and if it allows too many results to potentially appear (not clear what this cut off number is). I mean even if "S-A-D" only brings up 5 apps, if when you first hit that "S" it brings up way too many, BLAM, reboot.
i think you may be right, just tried X and got say 10 results without a crash, then tried Y, same, then Z, same, no crashes. Tried A and bam, down she goes. strange. I know i didn't have this issue when i had the extra pages cheat going on, maybe its tied somehow to more pages worth of apps being hidden than visible? The only thing i did before this all started was use a different computer as the main syncing one, so my extra pages got wiped in the process, ever since then its been wacky.
Yeah, I really think it's a numbers game. Here's one theory. If the most visible apps you could have is 176 (it's gone up from the initial classic 148), perhaps when you have a search result that contains more than 176 (or very close to) the search engine explodes since, being a good Appleton, there should never be any REASON to consider more than 176 potential apps in a search.
I have 288 visible apps on my non jb touch. 18 visible pages with 16 apps per page. Of couse since this is all that I put on it, I don't need to use the search button since I can see them all. Maybe if I get bored, I can throw a few extras on there (non visible) and try to search for them. Or maybe, I won't mess with it, since it works just fine as is.
