Why my Igor 8 often crash?

The short answer is that without more information we can't answer your question.

If you sometimes get a crash report please use the Help->Contact Support menu item to contact support and send in your crash report. That may give us some clues.

If you can come up with a recipe to reproduce the crash, please also use Contact Support to let us know how to reproduce the crash. If we can get Igor to crash using your recipe, we can likely fix the crash.

You might try using the latest nightly build (Help->Igor Pro Nightly Build) if you aren't doing that already, as we may have already fixed the crash.

Perhaps it is because of memory shortage. Usually when I let several Igor files open at the same time and then when I switch from one file to another, the crash may occur. And in this case it will not generate a crash report. So I think it is possibly because of memory shortage.

I have already send the crash report. Thank you!

Yuan Fang sent the crash reports and most of them point to a problem that has been fixed in the nightly build for Igor 8 (past the release of the official 8.04).

For what it's worth, when using the 64-bit version of Igor, a crash due to low memory is very rare because the OS will resort to using disk swap if an application requests more memory than is available at the moment. In such a situation Igor could be very slow and potentially appear unresponsive, but it shouldn't actually crash.

On the other hand, sometimes you will get an actual out of memory error in a situation where it seems very unlikely. Sometimes that is valid, but it might also be that NOMEM is error code number 1, so NOMEM is sometimes used when it would have been better to add a new error code to more accurately describe the problem.