Author Topic: Black screens and application slow down  (Read 20953 times)

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2017, 10:21:55 AM »
Would it make it worse/better to set the auto-save time frame at shorter interval?

The auto-save interval is almost irrelevant, as long as you have the Auto-save after significant events preference enabled.  The only thing auto-saving per an interval gets you is the closer to the exact time on the clock if something goes wrong.

I just tested a tournament with only 16 players and went about 2 rounds with about 5 bustouts and 3 rebuys and then got the black screens.

In my testing, I didn't see any issues until busting out at least 50 players, or more (I can't recall off the top of my head).  I feel like it was closer to 100.  Of course, it's not just buying players in and busting players out.  Other actions affect memory as well.  So whatever you did before you started the tournament contribute as well.  Regardless, that seems like a very small number of actions to cause this issue.

danDTGB

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #16 on: January 08, 2018, 06:42:39 PM »
So, we've been fighting with the black screen for a while. We typically run between 125-150 players every Monday.

We've been using 2 laptops to just keep the flow going well. One crashes we keep going on the other, etc.

We just had a new problem that I am trying to attach to this post. Hopefully all can see it.


Just wondering on if anyone has any luck getting around this problem?


Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #17 on: January 09, 2018, 08:04:47 AM »
Typical IE error message with no meaning.  Any idea when this is happening?  Maybe when it is auto-saving?

begodon

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #18 on: January 10, 2018, 11:19:02 AM »
Hi Corey, i've been getting the Black Screens for a while now and it does not look that i have any pattern for the error to happen, it's not after x players or after x bust outs, it happens randomly, sometimes with just a few like, 12, 13 players, sometimes takes longer and goes well into 30 players or more. Then when it crashes, i close TD and open again during the tournament, what was suposed to clean the memory and fix it, but it lasts for just a few actions until it send me black screens again, like, 1h of clock running and 2 or 3 bust outs will be enought to give me black screens again.
When the memory starts to fill up, my layout also starts to randomly change the spacing between elements until eventually some of them goes missing from the screen, like the actual blind for example...

I Don't know what to do to fix it, since you've said that rolling back to 3.3 will not fix this, any suggestion?
« Last Edit: January 10, 2018, 11:32:13 AM by begodon »

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #19 on: January 10, 2018, 11:40:16 AM »
You can certainly try to roll back to 3.3.  My testing of 3.3 and 3.4 shows their memory consumption to be almost identical.  But the fact remains that I get far, far more automated "out of memory" error reports from version 3.4 than version 3.3.  Anecdotally, users of the software report more "out of memory" type issues with 3.4 as well.  So I can't explain why, but 3.3 might work better for you.

Silver Owl

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #20 on: January 11, 2018, 08:59:01 AM »
Rolling back to 3.3 worked for me. I've never had the black screen with 3.3.

danDTGB

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #21 on: January 15, 2018, 02:05:09 PM »
I thought I had already responded on here. Evidently not.

As for when the error message comes up, not fully sure. It's the first time I've seen that particular one - which caused it to crash immediately after.

We typically operate split screen. The TV shows the tournament clock. We run the tournament via the table page and remove players from there. So, not sure if the issues are when it auto-saves.

Our tournaments typically range from 50-70 players for one game and 120-140 players for the other. We have definitely had more issues with the larger game than the smaller. Problems occur earlier and more often.

In fact, it's forced us to use 2 laptops to run the same event. In doing this, when one crashes we can keep the clock running on the other and try to get times coordinated.

I can say that we've been working with Corey via email for quite some time on the problem and he's been awesome helping us. Unfortunately, the program still has the problem. In fact, I hate to say it but it appears to be getting worse.

We've been using TD for a number of years. Overall pretty pleased. This is my only complaint and I hope a fix is coming soon.

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #22 on: January 15, 2018, 05:11:32 PM »
I do believe this is a memory issue specifically with IE 11.  Googling "internet explorer 11 memory leak" gives a ton of other applications experiencing the issue.  I think the biggest problem stems from the fact that Microsoft appears to be "done" with IE, so there's unlikely to be a fix, and at the same time Microsoft is forcing everyone to use IE 11.  I'm definitely working on it.  I'm hoping to find a smoking gun - some change in the TD application that exposed the IE 11 memory leak, but I'm afraid it's going to end up being a lot of little things that have accumulated over time.

As an example of a smoking gun, memory usage increased quite a bit from version 3.1 to 3.2.  That makes it a good place to look for things in the application that changed.  I found a big one: I added jQuery in version 3.2 (I didn't actually use it yet but it's loaded with the rest of the code).  When I removed it in my test, the memory size decreased a lot.  Not all the way back to 3.1 levels, but nevertheless a serious improvement.  The problem is, since I wasn't using jQuery I removed it from the application in a later version.  Yet we're still here with a big memory issue.  So while it felt like a smoking gun, it turns out it's not.

jodybingo

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #23 on: January 20, 2018, 10:49:37 PM »
Gonna add my two cents...
I have TD running on 2 computers (both W10). I do all the usual on one and on the other I am currently using it to display information on a tv screen for my players (upcoming events, entry cost etc). It is on this second machine where TD gets the black screen (and sometimes white). I get the out of memory message and the attached screen cap popped up tonight and oddly I couldn't even kill TD through the Task Manager (a reboot was needed). My first machine sometimes runs into a problem when I send receipts to my Epson. I have to shut down TD and my printer before they work properly again, but this is a minor issue as I rarely have this happen once the clock is running.

As a side note, my main machine that doesn't run into memory problems is a T7500 Xeon with 18GB of RAM. My other machine that crashes is an Intel Core2 with 4GB of RAM
« Last Edit: January 20, 2018, 10:51:22 PM by jodybingo »

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #24 on: February 08, 2018, 02:44:25 PM »
One thing I'm working on now, and I can't believe I forgot to mention earlier, is the Points for Playing formula.  Since tournament state is recomputed constantly, the Points for Playing formula is evaluated again and again throughout the tournament, for every player.  Similar evaluations are happening for determining when to fire events and for which screens and cells and cell properties to display.  When I prevented the evaluation of formulas, memory use dropped dramatically.  So in version 3.4 I added some code to skip formula evaluation when your Points for Playing formula is empty.  It's a cheap attempt to workaround the problem, but it might help.

So I recommend, if you're using version 3.4 or later, clear out the Points for Playing formula before your next tournament.  You won't see points accumulated during the tournament, but you can always put the formula back after the tournament ends and points will instantly be computed for every player.  Hopefully this will help with the memory issue while your tournament is running.

In my testing this dramatically improved the memory size.  For example, with a 300 player tournament, the memory size got to 1GB by the time 120 players were busted out.  By the time 140 players busted out, it was over 1.5GB and usually the application crashed.  I was able to refactor the way formulas are evaluated.  After the change, the tournament was able to bust out all 300 players with the memory size reaching around 350MB.  The application remained completely responsive and didn't appear to slow at all.  Not perfect results but a really big improvement.  This will be in version 3.4.3.  I hope my results are not isolated and this helps everyone.  In the meantime, try removing your points formula as described above.

tandemrx

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #25 on: February 08, 2018, 03:50:53 PM »
great find, Doesn't seem to help me.

I played a 10 person tourney last month and towards the end (only 1 rebuy), my system was clearly slowing down (such as responding to space bar presses to pause the clock, etc), but I didn't get black screens.  I pressed on towards the end as I was dealing and didn't want stop and close TD and restart it - though I should do this at a break I guess just to be safe.

The only thing in the points formula box is the default wording "The number of points a player receives . . . " that disappears when you click in the box.

I assume there is no other setting I need to turn off if I don't have a formula in their to begin with.

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #26 on: February 09, 2018, 01:42:28 PM »
I honestly do not expect this to fix the issue for everyone, because of the varied experiences, and I seriously doubt this is the only place in the code that is exposing this memory leak in IE.  I just hope this helps some.  It could still help if you're already using an empty formula, potentially, since it effects all expression/formula evaluations, which as I mentioned is done for events and the layout.

What happens when IE runs out of memory almost seems random to me.  For example, the last 3 tests I ran where I continued until IE ran into trouble, I repeated the exact same test (it was automated) and got 3 different results.  First time I got a dialog window that said "Out of memory".  I couldn't do anything with the application, because every click made a "ding" from Windows like there was an open modal dialog over the application.  I had to kill it with the task manager.  Next time the application simply exited.  No warning, no errors, no nothing.  Just gone.  The third time, Windows showed an error message noting that the TD crashed and that Windows was going to restart it automatically (which it did).


tandemrx

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #27 on: February 09, 2018, 03:41:18 PM »
So you are saying that as long as I am using 3.4 & no formula then I am good as far as this helps?

Nothing else I need to do in regards to 3.4 as long as I don't include a formula in the "points for playing" box in the game tab? (No preference or anything else I need to check or uncheck so that the points box is ignored?).

Corey Cooper

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #28 on: February 09, 2018, 10:02:26 PM »
Correct.  That's all I know that will help at this time with version 3.4 or later (that and the steps outlined in the main post in this topic).  Version 3.4.3 will have a refactor of the evaluation code, which in my testing helps a lot, but your mileage may vary.

BrianKristiansen

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Re: Black screens and application slow down
« Reply #29 on: June 10, 2018, 02:20:48 PM »
any version that we can go back to that dosenst have these issues ?

i have constant breakdowns every tournament - and i just bought a new pc hoping that would fix the problem - but it dident :-(