ART crash during chip start

[Jordan Schmidt]

Hi, over the past few months two of the larger events I've timed (1k and 500 starters) both had ART crashes during the chip start phase. I didn't get too many details either time because I was only focused on getting the program back up. Are there crash reports available? Has anyone had this experience, I've never seen this before and I didn't find anything related by searching this forum. Thanks. 

[Christopher Regan]

I was having some crashes. Recently I disabled anything that was writing to files including the things in the upper right on the Time Reace that were constantly updating as I wasn't using them for anything. I haven't had any issues since.

I also uninstalled any apps I wasn't using and disabled any programs that were starting up that I didn't need.

[Brian Agee]

As mentioned in another post, the 6.5 update should handle writing data out a lot more efficiently. Also, there is a crash report you can view, click on the "View Error Log" link at the bottom of the Settings screen.

[Jordan Schmidt]

I don't see anything related in the error log. Is this a common problem that other timers might have experienced? 

[Brian Agee]

When you click on the "Help" menu, what "file version #" does it show?

[Jordan Schmidt]

I'm on the latest, 1.6.5.2

[Brian Agee]

Hmm, when you open the "Settings" screen, how much RAM and how many CORES does it show your computer is running? It's listed at the top left of the settings screen in the title bar.

[Jordan Schmidt]

On the same computer that crashed for me twice this summer on chip starts, it is 12 core and 16GB of RAM.

[Lucijan Tominšek]

Do you use a UPS? A week ago, my ART program froze for the first time, and my reader also crashed several times in a row. Luckily, I had a video backup to get the results. When I was checking the equipment, I realized that while we were not paying attention, the man who was taking care of the music at the event had plugged his sound system into my UPS. As soon as I unplugged its power supply from the UPS, everything started running like clockwork. So the moral of this story is that only the reader should be plugged into the UPS and absolutely nothing else.
Lucijan

sreda, 17. september 2025 ob 02:12:16 UTC+2 je oseba Jordan Schmidt napisala:

[SportMadeSimple]

I don't know if this adds to the discussion or distracts from it, but I do believe there is something adding to the instability.  In 10+ years have never really had any crashing issues before the last couple of months.  Yesterday I had a blue screen of death on my chip read computer mid race.  I had timed a few events without issue and then in the 4th race I decided to turn on the live lif export to see how that lif file compared to the ones I was generating in Finishlynx and mid race the computer went out.  Thankfully we just kept marking athletes in Finishlynx until we could get the chip reads up and running again. 

In my case it's definitely possible that it's unrelated to what i was doing in Agee that caused the crash (older computer - Win 10 Pro w/ 8 gb ram, but I've used it for several years and never had a crash before) , but I thought the timing was pretty close to the change in the setting so I'd mention it since it's a newer feature.

On the positive side, once Windows did it's thing with the blue screen, getting Agee up and reading again was so fast and we didn't miss a beat... it pays to have redundancies :)

[Jordan Schmidt]

Interesting. I actually plug in 3 items to my finish line UPS - reader, modem, and router. Sometimes I also plug non-essentials into the non-battery side. Does this really matter? I could easily follow this advice, thanks!

[Lucijan Tominšek]

If it's a modem and router, I doubt that this could have any beneficial effect, but if it's a larger energy consumer, then according to my experience yes, because this happened to me for the first time and as soon as I removed the source from the UPS, everything started working normally, without any problems. Also be careful in the reader settings in ART program, if you have multiple readers enabled, but you only use one........

četrtek, 2. oktober 2025 ob 14:10:03 UTC+2 je oseba Jordan Schmidt napisala: