Stop Katalon Studio from Hanging or Crashing — Apply the Official Workarounds in katalon.ini

Tips and Tricks
1

Problem

Katalon Studio randomly hangs or crashes during normal use. Common symptoms include the application closing itself after a period of activity, Groovy script syntax highlighting disappearing, or the code in Script Mode appearing entirely white (no colors). Crashes become more frequent on later versions and when multiple split tabs or multiple Studio windows are open.

Solution

According to the official troubleshooting page Resolve Katalon Studio Hanging and Crashing, the root cause is a known bug from Groovy Eclipse — the plugin bundled with Katalon Studio — which causes abnormal memory or thread behavior. Katalon documents five workarounds. Apply them in order, restarting Studio between each one until stability returns.

How to

Workaround 1 — Disable “Mark Occurrences”.
The Mark Occurrences feature continuously scans the active file and stresses the Groovy Eclipse engine.

  1. Open Katalon Studio → Window > Preferences > Java > Editor > Mark Occurrences.
  2. Uncheck “Mark occurrences of the selected element in the current file”.
  3. Click Apply and Close, restart Studio.

Workaround 2 — Override the Chromium args in katalon.ini.

  1. Open katalon.ini from the Studio installation folder.
  2. Locate the line starting with -Dchromium.args=--disable-features=SystemNotifications and replace it with one of:
    -Dchromium.args=--disable-features=SystemNotifications --disable-gpu --disable-software-rasterizer
    or
    -Dchromium.args=--disable-features=SystemNotifications --disable-gpu --disable-gpu-compositing --disable-software-rasterizer
  3. Save, restart Studio.

Workaround 3 — Clear workbench state and relaunch with the clean flag.

  1. Close Katalon Studio completely.
  2. Delete workbench.xmi at:
    [Katalon Studio installation path]\config\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.e4.workbench
  3. Open a terminal in the installation directory and run:
    .\katalon.exe -clean -clearPersistedState
  4. Relaunch Studio normally after the command completes.

Workaround 4 — Disable Combined Hover.

  1. Open Preferences > Java > Editor > Hovers.
  2. Uncheck Combined Hover.
  3. Click Apply and Close, restart Studio.

Workaround 5 — Force the SWT Browser to use IE rendering (katalon.ini).

  1. Close Katalon Studio.
  2. Open katalon.ini in the installation folder.
  3. Add these as new lines at the bottom (keep existing entries):
    -Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.DefaultType=ie
-Dorg.eclipse.swt.browser.UseDesignMode=false
  4. Save and relaunch Studio.

If issues persist after all five workarounds, the docs note that a full reinstallation may be needed and to ensure you are on the latest patch version.

Outcome

Katalon Studio stays responsive during normal editing, debugging, and test execution. Crashes that occur every few minutes drop to a level where you can do a full day of work without interruption.

Reference

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Hope this saves someone a debugging hour :folded_hands:

I share more real-world Katalon patterns I run into while supporting customers on the academy — you can browse my profile here if you’d like to read more: Meet the contributor: Phuc Truong

If you’ve hit a variant of this or solved it differently in your environment, drop a reply — always interested to hear how other teams handled it.

3

Hmm Katalon has resolved that crashing and hanging issue in the latest version i.e. 11.1.3 and upcoming.
That issue was present in the 11.0.1 initially when it was launched, but later on it was resolved.