When working in particle mode and using the comb blender locks up my computer to the point I have to hard reboot it. My system becomes completely unresponsive so I can't see if there are any error messages when it happens. It seems to only happen when I use the mouse to rotate to the top of the head in the attached .blend file, but not if I use the number pad to rotate to any of the fixed views. Sometimes it crashes right when I open the file, other times it takes a few mins before the crash happens. Right before my system locks up my CPU load is maxed out (I have no other programs running at the time).
This problem happens on both my Windows and Linux partitions, leading me to think it is hardware related.
OS tested on: Windows Vista Home Premium SP2 (64 bit) and Ubuntu 12.04 (32 bit)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 6870, Catalyst drive 13.3
CPU: AMD FX-8350
RAM: 16 GB
I am also attaching my system-info.txt file.
This crash has happened in the blender official release numbers 2.67b (Windows and Linux) and 2.66a (Windows), I have not tried it on any other versions.
Also is it possible to limit the number of threads blender uses in edit mode (I know how to do it for rendering), that way if it crashes like this it does not lock up the entire system?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Description
Event Timeline
I don't think Blender would use particle threads in edit mode in this file unless you enable showing child particles, but the number can be controlled with the same value as the render threads.
I couldn't redo the issue on OS X with NVidia graphics but that's not so surprising, this will need to be tested with an AMD graphics card probably.
Just to claify, it uses multiple threads when I am in particle mode, not edit mode. When I use the hair comb all 8 cores of my CPU jump up to 100% used regardless of what the rendering thred count is.
Ok, I think it's probably the operating system or graphics drivers that are launching those threads for some reason, not Blender itself. How many threads they use is out of our control, so the only solution is probably to fix the actual bug.
Today I ran across another .blend file that locks up my system. When moving round the 3D view (and doing nothing else) in the .blend file found here http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67064 my cpu use goes to 100% and my system locks up. I even tried using windows task manager to limit the number of cores blender can use, and it still locks up my system.
Not sure if it is relevant or not, but both of my computer's partitions are using AMD's APP SDK v2.8 (http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/heterogeneous-computing/amd-accelerated-parallel-processing-app-sdk/downloads/).
I have fixed the problem! I had to completely remove all ATI drivers on my computer and then install/reinstall the latest versions and now everything works as it should. It looks like I just had a bad combination of drivers and hardware.