I got some really aggressive crashes in the last weeks that are very frustrating. It appears in only one in 20 to 30 games, but it is devastating: 1. PA becomes unresponsive. No interaction is possible, but ambient sound is still playing. Windows itself is responsive at first, but gets slower and slower every second. 2. After 10 to 20 seconds the hard disk begins to work like a madman. At this point (and a bit before too I guess), Windows is too busy to even register a CTRL-ALT-DEL and even mouse movement becomes laggy. 3. 10 seconds after that, the complete system freezes and the sound hardware just repeats its last sound buffer over and over again. (buzzing noise) 4. Only a hard reset fixes the situation. It is possible to avoid the system lockdown by immediately killing the whole PA process tree on noticing step 1. However, this needs to be quick, because the time until the system locks down is not enough to start the kill tool. When neither the task manager or another tool (I use process explorer) is open and ready before step 1 appears, the lockdown is inevitable. The crash is especially annoying, because there also are short freezes that behave like step 1, but disappear again after about 5 seconds, so it is impossible to know what exactly will happen until it is too late. (and I can't just kill PA on every random short freeze, I would lose precious game time while building the system and all unit groups and camera anchors are gone too when reconnecting) This also makes playing ladder matches very risky. The time that I need to completely reboot and start PA again exceeds the connection lost timeout, so I immediately lose that game. There are so many games needed to climb up one place of the ladder, but losing vs someone new knocks me back 2 to 3 places immediately. I would love to help to get this one fixed, so if there are any log files I should append, just say so and I will do.
Those are tell-tale signs of memory running out. Number 2 is your computer desperately trying to use its virtual memory. 8GB of ram is usually enough, but if the system is particularly large or there are many many many units, you can hit the limit. The only way to fix this is to get more RAM. It shouldn't happen during ranked 1v1's though as those games are on very small systems. I'm not sure where the random tiny freezes could come from though. If you have any background programs running, try closing those to keep as much memory available for PA as possible.
I second this, start your taskmanager and have a look at it while it happens to verify it. If it happens even on the tiny ranked systems it may be some form of memory leak in PA.
The last occurrence of the lockdown was today on forge, the smallest planet in the 1v1 pool, at the 7 minute mark... no games played before that one. The only memory eater I have running often is Firefox, with about 1.2GB memory usage when it is used much. At the time of that game it was not running though. With all programs normally running (Firefox+Steam inclusive) I get 30% to 40% physical memory usage. I just played a test game on amplus (quite big) and had 78% at the start of the game. With 6k units patrolling all over the place to increase the replay size I got the memory usage to 89%, although sim speed was greatly reduced by then. The cases where the lockdown happens don't have nearly as much stuff going on. I will try to remember to let resmon open on the 2nd screen from now on, to keep an eye on memory...
Yeah, it would be interesting to see if you can find a way to reproduce this. It does sounds like a memory leak as cola_colin mentioned. Specifically, does the memory usage increase after each game without closing PA?
just happend to me. that was minute 4 or so on forge the game crashed and for a moment even the taskmanager and windows in general suffered, I could kill it and restart though, but I was at 9GB+ ram usage, so with 8GB of ram this would have been the end. EDIT: http://crashes.uberent.com/report/index/bp-88eca220-79ce-4d16-9a45-499992150317
I just noticed, that the test game from before left some orphaned CoherentUI_Host processes running, that did not stop when I closed PA. Memory usage of those ranged from 18MB to 99MB. However, it is normally not the case that some processes are left over after after PA closed. (steam will not launch PA again when there are some active) Might be unrelated. I copied the command line parameters of them, just in case they are needed. I will make a series of test games now and keep an eye on memory. edit: played 4 games, nothing noteworthy happened. avg total system memory usage: - in main menu 50% before 1st game, 60% after that - in lobby with planets loaded 62% - on commander drop 67% - on game over screen 78% no orphaned processes left over when pa exits. I really wonder what is causing these memory spikes... edit#2: Loading and watching the replay of the crashing game earlier today does not reproduce the memory spike. (lobby id is 1946747425086605633, no pastats entry because nobody reported the victory) Does that mean anything at all? I don't know what to think anymore, brain is fried for today^^
Happened to me again on stable, first game, small map. After a longer break from PA I thought maybe I could try playing again... (edit: that bug made me take that break in the first place) I normally am not the raging kind of person, but this bug is maddening. How am I supposed to train with this? *grumbles* I will try my luck with pte...
Could your most recent PA log file the next time this happens? Said file is in %localappdata%\uber entertainment\planetary annihilation\log
I had a simmilar crash, but it didn't kill the whole system. After about 3 to 4 minutes, I could terminate PA. The log is here: http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s0173474/PA/Crash_longfreeze_nolockdown_PA-14-22-58.015.txt This might not be the crash that we are looking for...
I have one! The log is here: http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s0173474/PA/Crash_plus_lockdown_PA-19-20-03.000.txt The end looks much like the stuff in last crash: "INFO [COUI] Argument conversion failed: Wrong type - expected Integer, got Null while converting argument 0 for handler holodeck.setCommanderId" This one features some other Null reference as well: "expected Number, got Null while converting argument 2 for handler holodeck.selectMatchingUnits" I had resmon open as well; I could see the memory of PA.exe skyrocketing... After 8GB it wrote even more to the pagefile. Soon after resmon was frozen too. Needed a hard reset, just like in the original post. The tragedy about this is that I needed the whole day to reproduce this... And it happened directly after I decided to screw custom games and played ranked. Life seems to be a bitch again :/ *edit: shortcut to the report of last crash: http://crashes.uberent.com/report/index/bp-dd0d2b86-5d82-467c-9902-13d382150524 (the most recent one didn't report) *edit 2: Wait, the Null references are occurring after every game? Woah^^
