Troubleshooting

Freeplane does not start

• Check that the java runtime environment is installed. Sun JRE 1.6 or later is recommended.
• Run freeplane.bat (under linux run freeplane.sh) from a shell and look at the output printed there.

If you can not understand the reasons for failure yourself, open a bug request and post there the output.

Freeplane throws out-of-memory exception

You can increase memory available to Freeplane by setting Java VM option -Xmx to higher values

Examples:

-Xmx1024M (1024 MB)
-Xmx2G  (2 GB)
-Xmx8G  (8 GB)

Depending on your OS the configuration can be changed at different places.

Windows

Add line

-Xmx4G

to files freeplane.l4j.ini and freeplaneConsole.l4j.ini which are used when you start freeplane.exe or freeplaneConsole.exe.

If you use freeplane.bat you need to configure this option there.

Mac OS

Go to Application==> Left click on specific application (like Weka)==> Show Package Content==> Contents==>

1) If you have the Property List Editor available, you can double-click the 'Info.plist' file. Open 'Root' and then 'Java'. Double-click on the value for the 'VMOptions' entry to open an array of values. Set the maximum (-Xmx) to e.g. 4 Gb as

   -Xmx4G

2) If you do not have the Property List Editor installed, you can edit the file in a text editor (be careful). Locate <key>VMOptions</key> and change the values as follows:

   <key>VMOptions</key>
   <array>
      <string>Xmx4G</string>
   </array>

Save the changes.

(thanks to http://jlog.org/property.htm for the description)

Linux

Edit freeplane.sh and replace -Xmx512m by whatever value you need.

Html text and images can not be pasted from Web pages in nodes and notes on Linux

It is a java issue on linux. Use Firefox for Windows with Wine.

Nodes are not displayed properly on linux if the map is zoomed

Install the latest sun java from http://www.java.com/de/download/. The open jdk behaves buggy and is also significantly slower.

I cannot find the spell check function

The spell checker has to be enabled, see the Spell checker how-to.

The editor freezes

Create an entry in Bugs and provide as much information as possible about the conditions under which the behavior occurs:

• Does it happen always if you do ...?
• Is there a dependency on the size of the loaded map(s)?
• Post the output of "java -version" (it contains the build number)
• Do you have something special in your environment?
• Is Freeplane consuming computation power when it freezes or not?
• Before the freeze, was there any activity in the logfile? At least if there is anything suspicious, please post the logfile.
• Can you stop it with normal means (close window, send SIGTERM, ...)?
• Try a downgrade to an older Freeplane version - does that help?

It would be of great help in any case if you would provide a listing ("stacktrace") of what Freeplane is currently doing when it freezes by using the jstack tool. Find out the process id (PID) of the Freeplane Java process instance via Taskmanager, top, ps or whatever tool. Let's assume that the PID is 2345. Please post the output of

 jstack -l 2345

(You have to replace "2345" with the real PID.) For comparison also post the jstack output of Freeplane before the freeze (if possible). As you can easily check by inspecting the output it's pure technical stuff, nothing of your private mindmap is contained in it. Unfortunately you have to have the JDK installed to use jstack (the JRE wouldn't suffice). Please tell us, if you cannot install the JDK for some reason. - We might be able to help.

For more on jstack see its Sun documentation.