Serious Lag Driving me mad!

[EmmienLightFan]

I have really bad lag on all my lights in one sequence! It is really annoying me now!

 

I have recorded it, here is the link. It is all in time in both Nutcracker and LOR, with perfect timing.

 

 

 

 

The part of the matrix on show is running from a Pixlite 4, on E1.31, and the arches are being controlled from an LOR RS485 dongle. My other lights on a RS485 dongle, with the LOR protocol, also lag in the same way, and often just freeze at the point they were on at the start of the chorus

 

 

Everything is almost fine for most of the song, but as soon as the chorus comes, it goes really out of time, and stays out of time for the rest of the song. It is really annoying!!!!!!!!!

 

My PC should be more than enough

 

Quad core AMD A8 3.6ghz

 

16GB of ram

 

Nvidia graphics with 4gb dedicated ram

 

I even tried copying the sequence out into a new one, and it is exactly the same.

 

Thanks for helping

[Darryl Lambert]

Theres no link 

[dgrant]

As Darryl said, at this instant, there's no link. Usually when a song gets out of sync, the usual cause is the audio track is VBR instead of CBR. Check it or process it through an audio editing program such as Audacity and see if this resolves the issue. You might also want to run the LOR Verifier and see if there are conflicting channels or other issues for that sequence.

[robongar]

Do you have a knot in the wire?

[Dcroc]

I am running an old XP machine with 2 gigs of ram.  The only time my machine seems to lag is when I run visualizer while controlling lights.  This only happened when I added a DMX this year. If my machine can handle it, I am sure that your issue is not with your computer, but rather in the software.  The fact that it only happens in one sequence and in one part of it confirms it, in MHO.

 

That being said, I have learned to stick with Intel processors. I use to use AMD, but ran into some issues with the chipsets playing nice with all my hardware.

Edited May 9, 2015 by Dcroc

[EmmienLightFan]

I will try the same sequence on my Surface Pro (With an intel) in a min. 

 

I played some more sequences and one of them, also with a lot going on, lags as well, and I also found that the lag also appears in the visualiser, but does not stop at the same times as the lights, and they end up completely separate.

[Jeff Messer]

Turn off move the grid while playing. It cleans mine up when the sequence gets really busy on just one of my songs.

[EmmienLightFan]

After reading your reply I tried turning off the grid movement, but it made no difference.

[indi]

Had the same thing going on too. I ended up getting a new computer with 8 gigs of ram. No lags now. Just say'n. Seems to have solved my problem.

[bob]

Hello,

 

Lag is often (but not necessarily always) associated with doing a whole bunch of lighting commands in a very very short time.  This overwhelms the comm network (and maybe other things), and things start lagging.  One easy thing to try, if you haven't already, is to bump up the comm speed on your networks (make sure that your controllers and the firmware in them can handle the speed you choose).  However, we have another thing that might help:

 

We often see sequences that have sections of effects that are something like:

• From time 0 to time 0.02, fade up from 0% to 12%
• From time 0.02 to time 0.07, fade up from 14% to 18%
• From time 0.07 to time 0.10, fade up from 20% to 30%
• From time 0.10 to time 0.15, fade up from 30% to 37%

Often, that sort of thing is completely unnecessary.  To the human eye, it doesn't really look any different than (or at least still looks as good as):

• From time 0 to time 0.15, fade up from 0% to 37%

This is much more efficient (when this sort of thing is being done on many channels simultaneously), cutting down on both loading time and on lag during play.

 

We have a tool that automatically "smooths out" brief consecutive fades in this way.  We have not published this tool, as it is not really ready for prime time (it's not very user friendly, not very configurable, etc.).  However, if you'd like, send me (bob@lightorama.com) the sequence, and I'll send you back the results.  I believe that everyone we've done this for has been happy with the results.

 

In the email, please clearly reference this thread's URL, which is:

 

forums.lightorama.com/index.php?/topic/35888-serious-lag-driving-me-mad/

 

Thanks,

 

Bob

[EmmienLightFan]

Had the same thing going on too. I ended up getting a new computer with 8 gigs of ram. No lags now. Just say'n. Seems to have solved my problem.

My PC has 16GBs

 

 

Thanks very much Bob, I have sent the Email

[EmmienLightFan]

Thank you so much! The sequence played perfectly and you did it so quickly! I cannot wait for that tool to be in the sequencing suite.

[wmilkie]

So it was your sequence that was the issue?

 

I did a lot of this in the past;

 

• From time 0 to time 0.02, fade up from 0% to 12%
• From time 0.02 to time 0.07, fade up from 14% to 18%
• From time 0.07 to time 0.10, fade up from 20% to 30%
• From time 0.10 to time 0.15, fade up from 30% to 37%

maybe that's what my visualizer lag problems were

 

Can't wait for that tool to be available also!

 

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[rwertz]

I was in a discussion about this a while back. Someone was commenting that the sequences they created directly in LOR for their pixels ran fine while people with similar channel counts, software, hardware etc. seemed to have issues. The speculation was that the issues might be related to sequences that were developed in other software and exported to run in LOR.

 

Is it possible that other programs are creating fade effects as individual (DMX type) step intensities and the program fails to translate it as a single fade effect when it exports for LOR?

[wmilkie]

sounds like Bob is saying that some of these effects like fades, can use a lot of cpu processing time

 

Maybe another 3rd party program could add to that timing overhead then, slow things down

[EmmienLightFan]

I was in a discussion about this a while back. Someone was commenting that the sequences they created directly in LOR for their pixels ran fine while people with similar channel counts, software, hardware etc. seemed to have issues. The speculation was that the issues might be related to sequences that were developed in other software and exported to run in LOR.

 

Is it possible that other programs are creating fade effects as individual (DMX type) step intensities and the program fails to translate it as a single fade effect when it exports for LOR?

That is very likely. I was using Xlights and it does have fades as lots of individual events.