Processing Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Ben Fry edited this page on 1 Nov 2017 · 18 revisions

Having a problem? Hopefully the information on this page will help.

I've found a bug!

Please use the forum for general troubleshooting questions, especially if it's something like Processing not starting up properly, or sketches not running.

What To Do

First, read through this page.
Second, also check the Supported Platforms page in case it's something specific to your operating system.
Third, check the Forum. The Forum is the place for "this isn't working" type questions.
Fourth, search the bug database to see if your problem has already been reported.

What Not To Do

Please do not:

Submit an issue saying "Processing is broken" or "Processing won't start". That's not helpful (see below).
Reinstall Java, it does nothing and just adds to the noise.

If it's a bug

If you don't find your problem, submit a new issue here.

When reporting please include information about

The version number (i.e. 3.1.2)
The operating system you're using (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.), and on what kind of hardware
A copy of the smallest possible piece of code that will produce the error
Details of the error, like the red spew that you see in the console.
Only one issue per report! Each issue should be one... issue. It's not a point-by-point letter for the development team. If you have multiple issues, file them separately. If multiple issues are in one report, it'll be closed.

For best results:

Write a useful title for the report. "Processing broken" or "visual problem" are dreadful titles. The first one isn't helpful because you're reporting an issue, so we already know you think Processing is broken. Saying "visual problem" isn't helpful because Processing is used to make visual things, so nearly all problems are "visual" problems.
The people receiving this report work on Processing in their free time because they think it's important for the community. Berating or insulting them is obnoxious, demotivating, and a good way to ensure that your report is ignored.

For stranger errors during compile time, you can also look inside the build folder which contains an intermediate (translated into Java) version of your code. The build folder will be located inside a temporary directory on your machine, probably /tmp/buildNNNN on Mac OS X and Linux, or on Windows, in one of its many "TEMP" folders, inside a buildNNNN folder (the Ns will be numbers or letters). The more details you can post, the better, because it helps us figure out what's going on. Useful things when reporting:

We want the minimum amount of code that will still replicate the bug. The worst that can happen is we get a report with a subject saying "problem!" along with a three page program. Sure, everyone likes a puzzle, but simpler code will receive a faster response.
Occasionally we may need you to pack up a copy of your sketch folder or something similar so that we can try and replicate the weirdness on our own machine. Rest assured, we have no interest in messing with your fancy creations or stealing your ideas. The Processing team is a pair of straight-laced boys who hail from the midwestern U.S. who were brought up better than that. And as we often lack enough time to build our own projects, we have even less time to spend figuring out other peoples' projects to rip them off.

Processing won't start! Nothing (or something strange) happens when I click “Run”!

All Platforms

Please first seek help on the Processing Forum. We've tested the releases and thousands of people are able to start Processing. If you find that a specific Tool, Mode, or Library is the problem after following the steps below please write to the author of that extension.
Try moving or renaming your Sketchbook. Sometimes a Mode or Tool conflicts with opening Processing. This will disable all Modes and Tools and a new Sketchbook will be created in the default location. Once Processing is opening again, code can be moved back into the new Sketchbook.
The sketchbook on Windows XP is Documents and Settings → username → Application Data → Processing.
On Windows 7 and later, it's Users → username → AppData → Roaming → Processing.
For Mac OS X, it's Users → username → Library → Processing.
An alternate approach to moving or renaming the Sketchbook is to change the name of each Mode and Library inside the Sketchbook one at a time. When the name of the Mode or Library that is causing the issue is changed, Processing will start and you'll know where the issue is.
Errors inside code that is outside of setup() or draw() may just hang/freeze Processing. For instance, with this code, if "blah.vlw" is not in the "data" folder, it may just hang (and won't work in any case). Never use loadXxxx() methods outside setup() and draw().
PFont font = loadFont("blah.vlw");
void setup {
// your awesome code
}

Windows

Try deleting your preferences file. On Windows XP this is located in Documents and Settings → username → Application Data → Processing → preferences.txt. On Windows 7 and later, it's in Users → username → AppData → Roaming → Processing → preferences.txt. Sometimes a bad preferences file can prevent the application from running. If you've recently hand-edited preferences.txt, that's also a likely suspect. Only delete the preferences file when Processing is not running. And do not modify the preferences.txt file inside the Processing "lib" folder.
Next try running from a command prompt with the following:

.\processing.exe --l4j-debug

This will create a launch4j.log file which will describe what's happening during the startup. Then you can post on the discourse section of the site to inquire for help, or the bugs database if you think it's a bug.

An exceptionally large sketchbook folder (especially on a slower machine/disk) can sometimes cause startup problems. The launcher starts, but times out because it assumes something is broken (the Processing code is still indexing the sketchbook) and says there's a launch4j error.
If you're having trouble with P2D or P3D (which use OpenGL graphics), update your graphics drivers. This is almost always the cause of problems in P2D and P3D.
Try disabling any overly protective virus scanning software. It might be holding things up, especially when libraries have been imported.

Mac OS X

Make sure your version of OS X is supported. See the Supported Platforms page for more information.
Open Console.app, found in Applications → Utilities → Console.app and see if there are any messages. If you don't know what they mean, post them to the forum where someone can help you out.
For weird hangs/nothing happening on startup. Do the following:

Open Applications → Utilities → Terminal.app

Assuming you have Processing installed in Applications, type:

cd /Applications

./Processing.app/Contents/MacOS/Processing

If that prints any error messages, report them on the Forum or as a new issue so that we can help troubleshoot the problem and prevent it in the future.

Linux

See the Linux section of Supported Platforms for additional notes.

This used to work and now it doesn't

Read the Changes-in-3.0 section of the reference.

Other Common Problems

Another common problem is placing images or files into the sketch folder by hand, rather than placing them in the data folder (or using "Add File..." to do so automatically). This will work from the PDE, but on export, the files won't be in included with your sketch because they're not in the data folder.
Watch out for issues with capitalization! Windows and Mac OS don't care about capitalization, so "blah.JPG" looks just the same as "blah.jpg". However, since most servers run on Unix, capitalization becomes a huge problem, because it must be exact. We've added some checks to try and catch this (at least for images) but they're not perfect. This can especially be a problem when the .JPG extension is not even visible (the default on Windows), so you don't know whether it's upper or lower case.

Out Of Memory Errors (java.lang.OutOfMemoryError)

If you get an OutOfMemoryError while running your program, use the Preferences window to increase the amount of available memory. Check the box next to "Increase maximum available memory" and enter an amount.

Depending on your OS and available RAM, there are limits on how much memory you can ask for.

32-bit operating systems and software are usually limited to addressing somewhere around either 2GB and 4GB of RAM at a time. This means that even if you have 8GB of RAM installed in your machine, you may only be able to use shy of 2GB per application. Most Windows systems seem to be limited to 2 or 3GB, while Mac OS X and Linux can usually access shy of 4GB. Upcoming 64-bit operating systems get around this restriction and increase the amount of available memory significantly. However, even if you're running a 64-bit OS like Mac OS 10.5, or a 64-bit Linux, a combination of factors (version of Java, etc.) may mean that you're still limited by the 32-bit boundary of 2GB or 4GB.

Use this preference with caution, because if you set the memory too high, programs will no longer run in Processing. When you hit run, you'll get error messages.

If this message appears after you hit Run, then you're trying to use more memory than the machine has installed:

Error occurred during initialization of VM

Could not reserve enough space for object heap

The following messages mean that you're trying to use more memory than the Operating System allows (regardless of how much RAM you have):

Invalid maximum heap size: -Xmx5000m

Could not create the Java virtual machine.

Invalid maximum heap size: -Xmx5g

The specified size exceeds the maximum representable size.

Could not create the Java virtual machine.

On Windows with 1G of RAM, the limit seems to be in the neighborhood of 1.5GB. Mac OS X and Linux seem to allow up to just shy of 4GB, depending on how much RAM you have installed. Usually you can allocate almost 50% more RAM than you have installed. i.e. for a machine with 1 GB of physical memory, about 1.5GB is the maximum that can be used. Your mileage will also vary with different versions of Java (1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6...) and your operating system.

On the other hand, Java on Windows XP, for instance, cannot address more than 2GB properly. So with OS and JVM overhead, the total possible memory available is in the neighborhood of 1.5GB (no matter how much RAM you have).

Unfortunately the memory limitations of Java set an upper bound that is outside our control. If you're having trouble creating very large images for this reason, you might look into the PDF or DXF libraries that are included with Processing, or the contributed Illustrator or SVG vector export libraries that can be found on the libraries page as another alternative for creating large format images.

Memory is like any constraint found in other media, you simply need to be more clever about how to deal with the limitations.

To check the amount of memory that's used so far, or how much is available, use Java's Runtime object:

// The amount of memory allocated so far (usually the -Xms setting)

long allocated = Runtime.getRuntime().totalMemory();

// Free memory out of the amount allocated (value above minus used)

long free = Runtime.getRuntime().freeMemory();

// The maximum amount of memory that can eventually be consumed

// by this application. This is the value set by the Preferences

// dialog box to increase the memory settings for an application.

long maximum = Runtime.getRuntime().maxMemory();

Why don't these Strings equal?

Comparing a string (quoted text) is different in Processing (Java) than it is in ActionScript or some other languages, which often confuses people. For instance, while this might make sense:

String[] lines = loadStrings("sometext.txt");

for (int i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {

if (lines[i] == "hello") {

println("hello found on line: " + i); // you'll never see this

}

You'll never see the message, even if "hello" is in the list. This is because a String is an object in Java, comparing them with == will only compare whether the two things are pointing at the same memory, not their actual contents. Instead, use equals() or one of the other String methods (eg. equalsIgnoreCase):

String[] lines = loadStrings("sometext.txt");

for (int i = 0; i < lines.length; i++) {

if (lines[i].equals("hello")) {

println("hello found on line: " + i); // happiness

}

"But if I write the following code, it works!"

final String HELLO = "Hello";

String hello = "Hello";

println(hello == HELLO);

That's because Java compiler detects two identical constant strings, so it groups them together, and their references (memory location) are identical. If you write instead:

final String HELLO = "Hello";

String hell = "Hell";

println(hell + "o" == HELLO);

It no longer works. Same for strings coming from an external source (file, Internet, etc.).

Why does 2 / 5 = 0 instead of 0.4?

The result of dividing two integers will always be another integer:

int a = 2;

int b = 5;

int result = a / b;

// result is zero

While somewhat confusing at first, this is later useful for more advanced programming.

To get fractions, use a 'float' instead:

float a = 2.0;

float b = 5.0;

float result = a / b;

// 'result' will be 0.4

It is not enough to just divide two integers and set them to a float:

float y = 2 / 5;

In this case, integer 2 is divided by 5, which is zero, and then zero is assigned to a float. The number doesn't become a float until the left hand side of the = sign. On the other hand, this:

float y = 2.0 / 5;

will work just fine. In this case, Java sees that 2.0 is a float, so it also converts the 5 to a float so that they can be divided, which makes it identical to:

float y = 2.0 / 5.0;

and because floats are being used on the right hand side, the result will be a float, even before it gets to the left hand side.

Number Trouble (NaN and Infinity)

NaN is shorthand for "Not a number", which means the result of a calculation is undefined. This is caused by dividing 0.0 by 0.0 or taking the square root of a negative number. Infinity is the result of a calculation that is too large to be normally represented by a floating-point number. It's commonly seen as the result of dividing a number by 0.0. Its opposite value, -Infinity, is the result of dividing a negative number by 0.0. These unexpected results are often hidden by variables. Check the value of your variables with print() to search for these and similar numerical problems.

color(0, 0, 0, 0) is Black.

The reason this doesn't work is that color(0, 0, 0, 0) creates an int that is simply '0'. Which means that fill(color(0, 0, 0, 0)) is the same as fill(0), which is...black. This is a problem of 'color' not being a real type, but just an int, plus the fact that we overload fill() to use both int/color for a color, and also an int for a gray. Since this is unlikely to be fixed anytime soon (if ever), there are multiple workarounds that you can use:

use fill(0, 0, 0, 0)
fill(c, 0) where c = color(0, 0, 0)
color almostTransparent = color(0, 0, 0, 1);
color almostBlack = color(1, 1, 1, 0);

Key Repeat on macOS Sierra

In macOS Sierra, Apple changed how key repeat works. In most applications, when you press and hold a key for some characters, a small menu will pop up that shows possible alternates. For instance, holding u might pop up a menu that includes ü and others like it. Unfortunately, this means that pressing and holding u inside a Processing sketch won't work properly. To fix this, you'll have to turn off that menu, by opening Applications → Utilities → Terminal and entering:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

You'll probably need to restart Processing after using this command.

Note that this will turn off the menu for your other applications as well, so if you need to bring back the old behavior, do the following:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

Common Issues (That Are Not Bugs)

Things that are often perceived as bugs, but aren't actually "broken":

Typing a semicolon after an if() statement and before its associated code block causes the if statement to do nothing:

if (somethingAmazing == true);

{

println("This happens, whether or not something is amazing.");

}

The semicolon immediately following if () should not be present here, as it effectively closes the if logic, so the code block beneath it will always run (regardless of whether or not somethingAmazing is true or false).

If you write informal code (some test lines, no setup()) and want to add a function (eg. void foo() { println("Foo"); }) you will get an error: unexpected token: void. You need to wrap your lines of code (not the functions!) in setup(). Technically, that's because if your code has no setup() method, Processing will wrap it in a generated setup(). But Java doesn't allow nested methods, hence the error.
If your code has methods (it's not just in static mode) or needs to run over time, it must have a draw() method, otherwise nothing will happen. For instance, without a draw(), this code will stop after the setup() method:

void setup() {