Client freeze/crash after few minutes of gameplay on Linux. (Manjaro)

Discussion in 'Mac and Linux' started by Rabcor, October 19, 2018.

  1. Rabcor

    Rabcor New Member

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    This issue did not occur until the recent update (oct 17 patch)

    I'm having an issue where my client seems to crash after just <5 mins of gameplay. It's a serious crash that freezes up my entire system. When it happens, the game slows to a crawl (<1fps) and after a few seconds completely freezes, and hangs my entire system. In order to avoid needing a complete reboot, I need to hit alt+f4 before my keyboard drivers freeze with the game.

    I don't know the exact nature of the issue, but it seems to be related to sound processing. When it happened I noticed that my mic stopped working on discord (requiring a restart to reactivate) and my pulseaudio-equalizer (ladspa) also crashed, which implies that pulseaudio itself crashed as well.

    Help would be greatly appreciated.

    Hardware:
    CPU: Intel i7-4790k
    GPU: 980-Ti (proprietary driver version 396.54.09 )
    RAM: 16GB
    Sound Card: Intel Corporation 8 Series/C220 Series Chipset High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)

    The sound driver in use is snd-hda-intel.

    I have tried using a trick I found on the internet, running steam/the game with this variable set:

    It had no noticable effect on the issue

    I also tried disabling pulse and running the game with just alsa. It seemed to run maybe a little longer but the end result was the same.

    I also tried using native runtimes instead of steam, that also had no effect.

    Next I tried running the game with --no-audio. Besides the fact that I had no sound, the issue remained the same, strangely enough.

    I am completely out of ideas now. My earlier deduction that it might be sound related is probably off all things considered, after all, when this thing happens to prevent my system from going on complete lockdown I have to hit alt+f4 before my keyboard drivers freeze, in essence, it could be anything, this crash is clogging up the entire system, it's insane.
    Last edited: October 19, 2018
  2. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Are you sure you are not running out of memory? It somewhat sounds like your system starts resorting to swap memory and then starts running at a crawl, basically freezing. The 16 GB you have should be plenty, but it will depend on the systems you are playing.

    When you run PA with --no-audio, PA will not touch the sound systems at all, so it would be rather weird to be related to sound processing.

    Can you try setting the local server to "Off" under settings -> server? What happens then?
  3. Rabcor

    Rabcor New Member

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    I don't have swap set up on this particular system. I cannot exclude the possibility of a memory issue but it seems quite unlikely after such a short amount of play. I assume the game will throw out errors of some kind when it runs out of memory? When running in the terminal or reading the logs, I get no errors at the time of the issue, except for some coherent UI thing that I am pretty sure is related to forcefully closing the game and not connected to the actual issue.

    The recommended amount of RAM for a dedicated server is only 16GB;

    Anyhow, I decided to test it. The game is using 7GB of RAM right out of the gate for me, and as I sometimes only have 10 gigs free at the time I run the game due to other background processes, it seems the idea that I'm running out of memory has merit, but keeping a close eye on the ram use... It doesn't seem to significantly advance beyond 7GB use.

    Noticably though as I have 1-2gb remaining I am not crashing, so it's possible that this really was the issue... I'll have to test it some more, quite funny how I never considered this possibility, I haven't had an out of memory issue for years :D

    The game seems to go up to 11GB of RAM use for me in just a short match against an AI if the game is locally hosted (offline) seems it's about time I start shutting things down to free up memory, and set up a swap partition... Or just upgrade my whole computer.
    Last edited: October 21, 2018
  4. lulamae

    lulamae Planetary Moderator

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  5. DeathByDenim

    DeathByDenim Post Master General

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    Ah, yeah, if you have no swap then running out of memory would just result in crashes of either PA or any other unfortunate program requesting memory at the time.

    I don't suppose there is anything in dmesg or /var/log/messages around the time of crashing related to audio?
  6. Rabcor

    Rabcor New Member

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    Didn't check, but yes this is the same conclusion I reached for now, this type of crash really fits what's happening, I'll need to play a bigger match to confirm it, but I'm pretty hopeful this is it.

    Also yeah multithreading is enabled. Although the server only seems to want to use 6/8 cores

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