Gary Levelius Posted February 27, 2013 Share Posted February 27, 2013 What's up with this problem? Have seen nothing addressing the issue since before Christmas. The problems reported by many users (who for some reason no longer are here) are troubling to say the least. I'm currently using a Showtime Director to run my show at a local fairgrounds light display, but with the addition of pixels and other DMX controlled devices, I'd like to switch to a PC or laptop. Given the issues that surfaced late last year and the lack of response addressing the problem, I'm hesitant to go that direction to the point of even considering other software. I simply can not afford buggy software or having to do constant reboots of the computer when I have very limited access to the display. Would someone of authority here kindly address this for me, including what changes or other things are being done to address this? -Gary- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don Posted February 27, 2013 Share Posted February 27, 2013 What version are you using? There was a memory leak identified in 3.5.0, 3.6.0, 3.7.0 and 3.8.0, which prompted the release of 3.9.0 (and 3.5.2, 3.6.2, 3.7.2 and 3.8.2). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Levelius Posted February 27, 2013 Author Share Posted February 27, 2013 Don, right now I'm running 3.8.0, I haven't upgraded to the 3.8.2 release yet primarily due to the reported issues with laptops and the power management issues that seemed to occur after users upgraded to the latest release. I would need to go laptop for the show to get heavily into pixels and, as you can imagine, I'm concerned especially since I'd be using E1.31 for those pixels and the problem seemed to crop up when the comm listener was running, which is required for E1.31 or DMX. -Gary- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan C Posted February 27, 2013 Share Posted February 27, 2013 My understanding is that if you were running 3.8.0 and came across the problem, the fix was released as 3.8.2. This allowed for the fix without having to jump to 3.9.0. Regards, Alan. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LOR Staff Posted February 27, 2013 Share Posted February 27, 2013 Don, right now I'm running 3.8.0, I haven't upgraded to the 3.8.2 release yet primarily due to the reported issues with laptops and the power management issues that seemed to occur after users upgraded to the latest release. I would need to go laptop for the show to get heavily into pixels and, as you can imagine, I'm concerned especially since I'd be using E1.31 for those pixels and the problem seemed to crop up when the comm listener was running, which is required for E1.31 or DMX. -Gary- If you have 3.8.0, then you should move to 3.8.2 (or 3.9.0 if you qualify) without exception. If you then have different issues, you should open a trouble ticket so we can track the problem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Surfing4Dough Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 Never heard what was found as part of this investigation that Dan mentioned would be done. Seems that some still experienced such problems even with 3.9. http://forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/25457-390-and-a-laptop-not-playing-nice/ I have just become aware of this issue. We will be giving it a high priority. If we cannot reproduce it on one of our machines we will certainly take up people's offers to help out.Dan I too have similar concerns as Gary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TGabriel Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 And here we go again with the promises that all is well. File a ticket and it will get fix. It been almost three months and there is no fix to talk about. It looks like it time to change software for the 2013 season (one that doesn't choke) Thomas Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrownOut Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 Ditto! Never heard what was found as part of this investigation that Dan mentioned would be done. -Logan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-klb- Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 Multiple thoughts here. 1) My recollection is that there are several users who were involved in various ways who often are not as active in the forums in the spring. 2) I believe there were multiple issues reported, both the quoted (by another user) thread about power supply cycling, and separately, issues relating to WMP, and volume, and possibly other fun.3) One of the things I remember was discussion that LOR was going to move away from WMP as the media player tool used in LOR. I suspect that some considerable changes will come with it. And while LOR has no reason to play with power management, would we even trust Microsoft if they said that WMP has no impact on power management?4) And the biggest one, you have months available to set up a sample show PC, and test the ability to run a stable show. After all, you can configure, and send data to many universes of E1.31 devices, without any of them being present. You could set up a couple of pixel strings just to have a monitor that the show is running smoothly, and not be too obnoxious in the overall scheme of things. 5) Remember, LOR found the leak that existed in several versions of code, without any posts that I remember here about the issue, and released a fix for not just the latest version, but several back versions that were also impacted. Given behavior like that, do you really think this is not being taken seriously? The biggest issue is the difficulty in reproducing the issue. It is very difficult to isolate and troubleshoot something that you can't reproduce. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SteveMaris Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 What happens when you have a memory leak in the software? ( I am well aware of the ones in my head) What are the symptoms people should look for? Just curious... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-klb- Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 What happens when you have a memory leak in the software? ( I am well aware of the ones in my head) What are the symptoms people should look for? Just curious...Eventually, no memory is availabe for new memory requests. Before it hits that point, the system slows down as it has to try to shuffle not recently used memory to swap disk, and eventually starts generating error messages, or just locks up or crashes. You can use the task manager to track memory use over time, and see if after the show is done each day, it returns to a consistent amount of memory used, or if that number is growing every day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
-klb- Posted February 28, 2013 Share Posted February 28, 2013 One more thought about being asked to open a ticket. Forums are no more a valid way to track incidents than email is. Yes, in my day job, we get a lot of work done through email, but fundamentally, at the end of the day, if there was no ticket, it never happened. Tickets have tracking, and metrics that get reviewed. They have a way to be visible if they are pending action for a long time. Email just gets forgotten about until you have some reason to search for it. Admittedly, I believe they should have a status for "waiting for customer input" separate from "closed" but without the ticket, they don't have a way to keep each separate incident cleanly compartmentalized, nor a way to look for how many similar incidents are being reported. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Levelius Posted March 1, 2013 Author Share Posted March 1, 2013 (edited) I'm going to add one more thing to this discussion of the power management issue and I will add from time to time until this issue is addressed. It has been found by a number of people (who shall remain nameless though many of you (especially at LOR) know them) that the problem is directly related to the comm listener portion of the program. With the control panel and comm listener running and NO scheduled show running, everything runs as normal. The problem happens (for the most part) when data is being sent to the comm listener by the show player. Perhaps the powers that be at LOR would do well to reach out with an olive branch and contact the folks who originally reported the problem and attempt to fix it for the good of ALL LOR users. Would seem to be in the best interest of everyone involved I would think and would definitely do wonders for customer relations. I've been a champion of LOR for a number of years and would love to remain so, but simply can't if they can't (or won't) address valid issues. I also won't file a trouble ticket since I have yet to experience the problem ( I don't yet run DMX or E1.31 on a laptop) so I have no way to replicate it at this time. As an addition, this issue is why I haven't yet gotten heavily into pixels as a computer (laptop in this case) would be required and I'm not going to do it if I can't do it reliably. -Gary- Edited March 1, 2013 by Gary Levelius Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dougd Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 I can open up a trouble ticket if need be. I was able to crash my show every night unless I broke up my show. This was on version 3.9 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gary Levelius Posted March 1, 2013 Author Share Posted March 1, 2013 I can open up a trouble ticket if need be. I was able to crash my show every night unless I broke up my show. This was on version 3.9 Doug, I have a laptop I was planning on using. It's an HP that I picked un on Black Friday 2011 so it's fairly new. I will probably be setting up a show to run on it and see if I can replicate the issue as well. -Gary- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 There were a few people (a hand full) who said that they had a power management issue with the S3 software. That issue has not been ignored and is being looked into. There are also people who mentioned a memory leak. We found a problem and released a fix for it rather rapidly. We continued to look into for additional memory leaks and did find a few and have fixed them as well. We took a customer's rather huge show and are using it as a test for any additional issues. There were a few reported problems last year, we take them seriously and are making sure they are fixed. Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 (edited) Gary (oops I mean Doug), Please do open a ticket as we will want to make sure that we have your issue covered and fixed. Dan Edited March 1, 2013 by LightORamaDan Addressed wrong person! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bob Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 Please send me (bob@lightorama.com) your sequence files, song files, show files, and schedule files. Please clearly reference this thread in the email. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Santas Helper Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 Dan and Bob, I think Gary stated he has no issue yet because he hasn't upgraded yet which is why he mentioned not opening a ticket.From what I gathered, he wants to make sure all is well before upgrading.Gary, please correct me if I'm wrong. Quoted from Gary - I also won't file a trouble ticket since I have yet to experience the problem ( I don't yet run DMX or E1.31 on a laptop) so I have no way to replicate it at this time. As an addition, this issue is why I haven't yet gotten heavily into pixels as a computer (laptop in this case) would be required and I'm not going to do it if I can't do it reliably. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LightORamaDan Posted March 1, 2013 Share Posted March 1, 2013 My mistake. I meant to address my post to Doug. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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