I'm trying to troubleshoot the frequent crashes I'm having with Houdini.
It crashes every 1 to 2 hours, depending what I'm doing. I cannot recreate most of the errors and since I don't really know what I'm doing anyways I assumed it was my fault.

I just upgraded to version 16.5.323. I've had very similar experience with versions 16.0.600, 15.5.565 and 15.0.354.
I have a late 2014 Imac with OSX 10.10.5(Yosemite) with an AMD Radeon R9 M290X 2048 MB.
I just checked and that graphic card is not supported in 16.5. I would have sworn it was supported in earlier versions.
So perhaps that is the issue.

- Does anyone know where I can find system requirements for previous versions of Houdini?
- Does anyone know if upgrading to a newer OSX will improve the situation?

Thanks in advance

Upgrading rarely fixes anything, it just wastes your time.

You may want to consider adding fan control software. I would guess you are over heating and that causes crashes.
https://www.crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control [www.crystalidea.com]

Another reason why software crashes is running out of physical memory, are you monitoring anything? (i.e. heat, ram, free space)

What kind of scene are you creating that causes the crash?
Are you crashing while simming, general interface usage, or render?

System Requirement are in the menu under Support at the top of this page.

Thanks for the tips. I hadn't thought of heating or RAM as the problem. I'm going to check that.
I have 24 GB of RAM. I'll try keeping an eye on the usage.

Crashes have been mostly while working, rarely while rendering of simming. I have not found any correlation in what I'm doing and crashes. I've also noticed that Houdini starts acting weird before it crashes. It's hard to pinpoint when that happenes because I'm not knowledgeable enough to figure out if something doesn't work because of me or because Houdini is about to crash.

- The System Requirements are for the current version of Houdini only. Is there a page of the Requirements for previous versions?

Try leaving the Material button on the 3D viewport in the OFF state. Lock that in as your viewport default. I experience crashes on the Mac when I reference an asset that makes heavy use of materials. Like the characters and terrain. When viewport materials are off there is less demand on the GPU ram, which might be what is happening. If you are running dual monitors off a 2GB card you have less than the minimum required GPU memory to run Houdini right from the start.

Another tip is to work in wireframe mode as much as possible. Once again this may lighten the load on the GPU.