Frequent Visualizer crashes

[George Simmons]

I think I need some help, or maybe I'm trying to do things with the Visualizer that it simply can't do. My Visualizer crashes a LOT. I'm talking daily, and often-times more than once a day.

I'm running Windows 7 (home premium, 64 bit, SP1) on a dual-core 3GHz machine with 4G memory. I alternate between 2 editor files. One is 500x500 size and consists on just one spiral tree. The second is 550x550 and has nothing except one mega tree and one spiral tree. As I do with all running applications, I minimize the Visualizer when I'm not sequencing, making sure that it's stopped first.

The Visualizer likes to crash in two different scenarios, regardless of which editor file I happen to have open. One scenario is if I minimize LOR and open a web browser and spend an hour or so online, or if I open a game and spend an hour or two playing, and then go back to do some more sequencing. The other scenario is the next day after the computer has had a good night's sleep. In both cases, when I enlarge the application and press the play button, the Vis completely quits responding. I read in a different thread that it takes the Visualizer a while to catch up sometimes, but when it goes dumb it's always a fatal condition, no matter how long I wait for it to return to consciousness.

Re-booting the Vis gets it to work again but it would be real nice if this boorish behavior didn't occur at all. Any ideas? Anyone else noticing this?

[james campbell]

maybe your display has too much going on and you wear out the visulizer and it needs a day off:D kinda like devmike

[ItsMeBobO]

Mine does not crash. But I want to chime in that when I leave Vis up simulating over night or for several hours with out playing a sequence; It fails to respond unless I drop from sim and start up again. Possibly related.

[BillyT]

I had a problem yesterday where the CCR would not update. Restarting the visualizer brought it back. It was at the end of a long day of sequencing, so I didn't get to check to see how long it would last.

One thing I'm not clear on, is what does the size of the background picture have to do with the performance of the visualizer? I mean, it's not the picture that is using resources as I see it, but rather the number of lights that require updating.

[LOR Staff]

Hmm.. I'll run some simulations overnight and see if I can see the same thing.

If you know how to work the windows 'Task Manager', & when you notice that things are not working, take a look at the resources the Visualizer is using. I'm most interested in GDI.

[josh3955]

On XP, I have found that if I open visulizer first, it actually causes my entire computer to hang...even the mouse...shoot even the caps lock key! However if I open sequencer, then visualizer, then it's good to go.

[LOR Staff]

josh3955 wrote:

On XP, I have found that if I open visulizer first, it actually causes my entire computer to hang...even the mouse...shoot even the caps lock key! However if I open sequencer, then visualizer, then it's good to go.

I have never experienced that.

Our development environment is XP, and I start/restart the Visualizer hundreds of times per day while testing / coding / etc.

If the Visualizer is hanging your system like that, I would suspect something is wrong with the computer/OS.