How to open multiple copies of Gephi in OS X?

[mars0i]

I find Gephi's ability to view changes in dynamic attributes using the timeline with dynamic GEXF data very useful. However, at this point (Gephi 0.8.2-beta), this functionality is not yet stable. My experience has been that I can load and use a single dynamic GEXF data file. Loading a second dynamic GEXF file sends Gephi into some sort of infinite loop, it appears.

A workaround might be to run multiple instances of Gephi. In OS X, the standard way to do this is to open multiple instances using the -n command line option to the 'open' command:

open -n -a /Applications/Gephi.app

Another way to open multiple copies of an application is to simply copy the entire application directory (Gephi.app, in this case), and then run the "new" application.

I've tried both of these methods, and in either case, the second copy of Gephi starts to open, and then silently disappears. Only the first copy of Gephi remains. (i.e. an icon for the second instance appears briefly in the OS X dock, but then disappears. After that, the unix command 'pstree' shows only the first instances running.) The unix console doesn't show any messages about this.

Any suggestions for how to run multiple copies or Gephi in OS X? Or some other suggested workaround to allow me to view multiple dynamic graphs?

[mars0i]

I did some further investigation. Opening the Gephi app in the normal way runs

/Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/MacOS/Gephi

which is a link to

/Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/Resources/gephi/bin/gephi

This is a Unix shell script. Running it will start Gephi once, but not a second time.

Question: Why is this? Is it just that it's the normal, expected OS X behavior, or does Gephi write to files I don't know about when it's running, for example?

When the gephi shell script runs, it does a lot of checking and configuration, possibly running another shell script, but ultimately produces a long command line that runs Java and Gephi. By copying this command line from the output of the Unix 'pstree' command, I'm able to run a second copy of Gephi. It complains about not finding "dev", which I think is an error generated by discovering that the lock file already exists. Oddly, I can't run a third copy this way.

(When Gephi opens, it writes a file under the user's home directory named Library/Application Support/gephi/0.8.2/dev/lock Maybe this is involved in some way, but experiments have not made that clear.)

This is frustrating. All I want to do is to be able to compare different dynamic graphs.

[eduramiba]

Hi,
Try to have 2 copies of Gephi and change the user directory in the Gephi/etc/gephi.conf file of the second copy.