App crashing in iPad simulator with no useful console info

Question

please forgive the total newbie here - I am running an app in the simulator, and sometimes when it crashes it posts useful info in the console, other times absolutely nothing. When it posts nothing, what would be good steps to follow to start tracking down the cause of the crash?

Answer 1

First of all open the debugger after the crash and look at the stacktrace.

In addition to that you could enable NSZombieEnabled for the executable when those vague bad access errors show up.

Debugger with stacktrace(top left window), XCode3

Stacktrace Xcode4

Answer 2

I can continuously reproduce this kind of behavior with our app. It uses ARC so im pretty sure nothing gets over released, and we have zombies enabled. Xcode will say "Paused" instead of displaying a list of threads, the "Continue" button is active, but doesn't do anything, and entering bt on the (gdb) prompt says No stack.

This is driving me crazy!