I bought two sequences from one of our well known vendors last week, unzipped the files and executed both with xLights. One rendered as expected, the other caused xLights to hard-crash. The sequence window just disappeared, no crash dump file. After many hours of testing each model in the offending sequence I determined that there was nothing wrong with it. Running the program on two different hardware platforms with different versions of Windows, the same problem occurred so it wasn't my environment. Doing regression testing on past versions of xLights I found that it rendered without a problem in 2021.5, hung the program in 2021.6 and crashed in 2021.7 through the current release. Looking at the release notes for these versions I found the following?
2021.06 March 1 2021
-- enh (kevin) Add Circles and Shatter transitions
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-- bug (dkulp) Fix issues with effects that need to render on the main thread being rendered
WAY too often if "Per Model" used.
2021.07 March 2 2021
-- bug (dkulp) Fix potential hang with "Per Model" render styles
-- bug (scott) Fix crash in swap transition
This correlated correctly with the render hanging in 2021.6. I then started to changed options in the Preferences tabs. I've always had Render Cache Enabled since the feature was introduced. I set it to Disable and the sequence rendered to completion. I've had xLights hard-crash now and then this year but never when doing a Render All.
I can't attach the paid sequence to this post but if a developer wants to look into it, the vendor has given me permission to send it to you via PM. The crash is 100% repeatable and I also have some other clues about just what is happening.
If anyone is experiencing inexplicable crashes when sequencing and you have Render Cache Enabled, set it to Disable and see if the problem is fixed.
John
