JabRef 4 on macOS Sierra crashing

I chose to update through the installer. When I open my .bib-file, and make a change, and hit save, the program crashes. Anyone else with this problem? Anyone who knows how to solve it?

In the meantime I’ll have to install an older version.

Does JabRef really crashes (do you get an error message?) or does it “just” freeze? The later problem is known https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/3236 but since none of the maintainers can reproduce it, we need further information from the community to solve it (especially thread dumps directly after the freeze).

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It just freezes. By thread dump, do you mean output from the Console? Otherwise, please elaborate.

For now I installed 3.8.2.

No, a thread dump gives more information as the console output (it allows to analyze at which point in the program execution it freezes). I think the following steps should work:

  1. Start JabRef and wait until it freezes
  2. Find the process id of JabRef using the command jps -l 70660 sun.tools.jps.Jps 70305 in the terminal
  3. Create a thread dump kill -QUIT <pid> &> jabref.log
  4. Upload / insert the content of the jabref.log file

For more information, see https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kb/TakeThreadDump.html.

Note, that some users were able to fix the freeze by changing a host file, see https://github.com/JabRef/jabref/issues/3227#issuecomment-330916219