LOR - Keep searching for that memory leak..

[Tim Fischer]

I see a couple of recent changes Microsoft sent out that could be the root cause. A couple have to do with kernel mode drivers, and one with embedded direct show content.

The commonality here seems to be Media Player crashing out behind our backs. Since one of you reported that audio continued after video crashed, that really points me towards the Direct Show change. Depending on how your media is formed, the Video could be processed via Direct Show, while the audio is passed off to a different decoder. The video could then crash, but the audio continue.

While the knowledge base entries talk about this being exploitable via Office, the actual DLL's changed are accessed not just by office, but also by WMP.

For the REALLY brave (and that means you pretty much are a GOD when it comes to Windows), you may want to see if you can back out "MS12-082: DirectPlay Remote Code Execution (KB2770660)". http://www.microsoft...s.aspx?id=35923 and see if that helps. I don't blame you if you don't want to try.

If it would help you to prove or disprove this theory if you had one of my media files, I will happily send one on.

As for backing out the change - I might be daring enough to do it during the final week after Christmas... Assuming having lights/controllers connected isn't actually required to make this happen, I'm also happy to help test this after the display season is over (by continuing to run "shows" on the show machine).

[LOR Staff]

I may take you up on that. I'm checking right now if I have a machine that hasn't taken the update yet.....

Ok, it looks like on one machine (a very old Dell machine running XP that I do my development on), the last set of updates I have is from November 16. I also have a Vista x64 machine with 4G that has been fully updated.

I have no problem dedicating the development machine for a couple of days, but the Vista machine is my main one and needs to be available during the day. I could probably scrape together a 24 hour period.

If I invited you to a dropbox, could you upload the entire show to me? The only problem I have is that I have no E131 bridge to test with. I'll segment my network to segregate the traffic, but that will only help if everything you have is multicast.

[RyanWPowers]

Any update on this situation? We're still having nightly crashes and it's a huge disaster for us. I feel like these issues are being discussed on deaf ears. No public response from LOR, no mention that there's a bug that they're working on and no mention of tips on how to avoid the bug. No priority of fixing the bug. Nothing. It's like I'm wasting my breath. EVERY year this is a problem. I think it's probably been 4 years since I've had a display run without crashing and constant software bugs. It's embarrassing.

[dougd]

Well apparently Bob's MIIP software saved me from having this problem for most of this season. I turned off the MIIP software and every night since my show has crashed. When the night starts out there is about 40k memory allotted to LORMonitor. Every song that plays and starts that number goes up. By about 8:30pm, my show starts at 6pm, LORMonitor memory is at roughly 1.4 gig memory. At this time a bunch of errors happen in the status window and the show stops running. Disable shows, enable shows and LORMonitor is at 40k memory again and the show starts back up. This has happened the last 3 nights pretty consistently. I am running version 3.9 on the software.

Mike, if you want I can zip up all my sequences and my show and send them to you.

[ItsMeBobO]

Miip changes the .lss file for every song. The status says change detected ending show. and restarts it. This process may be clearing something or it could be that no song plays twice in the same schedule of the .lss

[CK57]

This is not just related to video files. I use a show PC with XP and have had the issue with 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9 versions of software. I have 14 sequences that loop nightly from 6 to 10 PM M-F and 6 to 11 Sat Sun with average LMS file of 20 KB and all are running from WAV music files average of 43 KB. Upgrade to Version 3.9 dropped my failure rate from once per day to 1 in 4. Usually by closing the enable schedule to enable schedule would clear thing up and restore things. On occasion I have had to restart machine. I only have 4 meg ram in show PC. The sequences were built on 64 bit machine and that is why WAV music files are needed. MP3 music files make things worse with 64 BIT. I run on three networks and have +1600 channels with 8 CCR's. I also use filtered USB cables and all Isolated USB adapters for each network. The fixes in Version 9 are close, but I agree we are not quite clear yet of the issue.

[WayneKremer]

I've had this issue for many versions now myself. During showtime I run large video sequences in sequential order. During the off-hours, I run music only sequences that consist of nothing more than 8 channels (turned off) with the audio track in random order. If it didn't reboot every night prior to the show, my machine would slow to a crawl to where it takes about 30 seconds to load the sequence it is going to play. Eventually the machine crashes. I can re-produce this problem every day.

I set my Win7 machine to automatically reboot using the scheduler every night at 5:00PM (show starts at 5:30PM). It would then work perfectly through the night and playing the off-hours music through the next day.

[Aaron Maue]

Wayne - I have a similar problem, with a very simple setup. I'd attributed it to Win7, but maybe LOR is causing issues as well. I'm running 3.1.4. No Cosmic Color devices or pixels. About 220 channels. I would begin having performance issues after about 2 days of "on" time. So, I too set up a scheduled reboot once a day. FWIW, I did mine at 4:00am each day. That gave me a chance any time during that day to be sure that the reboot had happened and that things were ready to go for that night's show.

[Tim Fischer]

Any update on this situation? We're still having nightly crashes and it's a huge disaster for us. I feel like these issues are being discussed on deaf ears. No public response from LOR, no mention that there's a bug that they're working on and no mention of tips on how to avoid the bug. No priority of fixing the bug. Nothing. It's like I'm wasting my breath. EVERY year this is a problem. I think it's probably been 4 years since I've had a display run without crashing and constant software bugs. It's embarrassing.

LOR is working on the problem. I know because I've been communicating with them via PM. I've offered to send them my entire show - which I still have to do. It's going to require me to send at least THREE DVD's as I have over 8 GB of video files and over 4GB of show files. Yes, GB.

Contrary to your experience, I've had LOR be rock solid every year until this one, and this is the first year there has been a significant number of people reporting software instabilities, so I think you may have local issues beyond the memory leak being discussed here.

Edited January 8, 2013 by Tim Fischer

[RyanWPowers]

I'd be happy to provide my show files as well. It's much more compact than what you've got going on.

Regarding my S3 experience, unfortunately that simply isn't the case. There were people reporting the same problems I had last year as well, which is well documented in this forum. I've never had a unique problem that hasn't been reported by others on this forum. There have always been a handful of people reporting the exact same situation as me over the past few years. And each subsequent year, the previous' years problems have been solved and new issues arise.

S3 is by far the least stable software program I've ever used in my professional career. I have a profession in Theatrical Technology, and have spent the last 10 years working on Broadway/Off-Broadway/National Tours and Theme Park attractions. I wouldn't recommend this software to my worst enemy. Don't get me wrong, the software is well-suited for the application and is incredibly feature rich. It's just simply not reliable.

[dougd]

Been running a LOR show for 7 years. I have never had a problem that wasn't caused by me. Didn't have a problem this year until the last few days. I am positive the problem will be resolved.

[sonny1]

I know it's old wood, but I've been having my system do a shutdown/restart every day, and this seems to keep things running smoothly.

Thisd system pretty much sits around, waiting for Halloween and Christmas...

 

I've got an old XP box, about 16 sequences that run from 5:30pm-10pm. I started having crashes every other day - and that typically indicates a leak, resource, or stack overflow somewhere... Mine seems to center around LORMonitor

I just caught one of these bugs in someone else's code, FWIW, and it involved a call to ME.CLOSE, in a subroutine that fired _OnFormClosing

...form is closing, fire close, which fires OnFormClosing again, which triggers ME.close, etc.... until the stack blows.

Oddly enough, this same code would not crash on XP, but would on Win7.... you gotta love software...

 

What I did to setup the autostart:

1. If you use the Scheduler, setup a task that runs the command

Shutdown -r

every day at a time about an hour before the show starts.

This will tell the computer to do a warm boot/restart

 

2. Set LOR to always start LORTray on pc startup

 

3. Bypass any login screen by AutoLogging in an account - XP can autologin an Admin ---(yeah, it's not a good idea, but I put my system on a subnet that's not the same as my in-house network). Search MS TechNet for Autologin and the OS that you are running.... I believe that in later OS's, you cannot autologin an Admin account.

 

So, the system reboots at 4pm everyday, the autologin starts up an admin account, and LORTray loads in, ready to start the show

It ain't pretty, but it works.

 

Hope this helps,

Sonny