general odd behavior

[brett]

Well, sad night for sequencing.    Getting lot's of odd behavior, some of which I have seen before and reboot to fix, others well.

I have tried tonight 2018.2, 2018.3 and 2018.4.  No matter what I do.  ANY TIME I try to select ANY group in the "Layout" Tab, xlights just freezes up.   I've waited as long as 5 minutes.  Just a total freeze.  CPU nor memory ticks up, everything just freezes solid.   Tried multiple versions and a couple of reboots.  No dice.

Second one, more problematic (because for now I can avoid editing groups...)  when I select and change a couple of different effects, totally at random, but do it quickly, (like click an effect, delete it, then click an effect, delete it.. etc, xlights decides to just go into memory consumption mode.

I just tried to delete a number of effects, and let things run.  For > 10 minutes, this is what the memory was doing (see attached screenprint.)

This is non-deterministic, no idea how or why randomly 2-3x per night while working on various effects, all of a sudden things freeze up, memory spikes out to all physical memory (and then starts paging to disk) at which time the machine is pretty much DOA.   Frustratingly to the point of having to pull the power cord and reboot.   Any idea why Xlights likes to go into some mode where it just chews up all available memory on the machine until drastic action is necessary?

Anything I can grab, show, or do to help troubleshoot either of these, please let me know.

[keithsw1111]

Sharing your files and maybe a video of it happening would help us fix it.

[brett]

I wish I could reliably reproduce the memory consumption error.

I can reproduce the issue with selecting groups and having the system freeze up.   In this example, there is general slowness selecting some groups, and when I get to Group_12_snowflakes... then everything dies.  I noted an odd message in the logs about Group_12_snowflakes, see in the attached.     Thanks for any insight.

[Gilrock]

I tried out your show layout and I found most groups selected really fast except the "sarajevo" and "really big  lights" seem to take a really long time to highlight but it does work.  There was no sequence in the zip file so I didn't feel like trying to create one to checkout the other things you mention.

[brett]

thanks for looking.  fwiw here is the sequence xml file.  no idea why group_12 keeps locking me up

[rposgood]

Not to hijack this thread but your issues are very similar to mine. Random freezing. Mine is mostly when clicking and highlighting a range of elements. If I go slower it seems to help. My logs never capture anything of value and my W10 logs only show xlights died.... I do see a lot of DCOM errors but nothing that says its related to xlights.

[Gilrock]

No idea what's causing the problems yet but it could be all the new features everyone want.  They want the model/group list to be sorted while at the same time some of you have a bazillion groups and a million submodels.  Some of these features everyone asks for have performance costs.

[brett]

Touche!!

I hear ya. Sorry if I am causing issues.   Just started using xlights a couple of months ago, hoping to help you and the community.

One thing interesting to note that I just caught.   Both of the groups having issues / performance problems have "spaces" in the group or model names... I am playing around hacking at my xml files to get rid of the spaces.

So.   I deleted (via xml hack) all of the groups with spaces, and renamed all of the models with spaces, and hopefully this is over.

Hoping that these were the problems:

"Group_12_Snowflake Group"
                                ^

"RBL #1-01" etc...
       ^

Hopefully the "Spaces" catch is helpful.   

Thanks for all you do guys.

-brett

[keithsw1111]

Spaces make no difference.

[Gilrock]

I hear ya. Sorry if I am causing issues.

I wasn't referring to you. You're brand new so you aren't part of the group that kept asking for a thousand new features....yet.