SoulseekQt pauses frequently, seems to be related to memory use

[Radio 2000]

I have a large library (500K files now) and for years, as it's grown, I've been noticing that SoulseekQt frequently freezes, seemingly at random, even with no interaction from me. On rare occasion, it's bad enough that it causes an upload to timeout, but usually it's just for a few seconds at a time.

This is on Windows 11, but it was happening on Windows 7 as well. I checked in Task Manager and noticed that it is always accompanied by a change in memory usage for the SoulseekQt.exe process. The process uses about 1.5 GB of RAM, per Task Manager. Giving it higher CPU priority does not help.

I tried using the diagnostics logging, which increases memory usage quite a bit of course, but I could not figure out any correlation between the freezes and any ordinary events (queuing, autosave, browsing, searches, etc.).

I'm hoping Nir can investigate this at some point because it's really annoying.

[Nir Arbel]

I prepared a release build that contains debug symbols that you can run inside the GNU debugger and break when the pause happens. You basically need to install MingW and GDB, you can ask chatgpt how to do that but if you run into any problems with that let me know. Once you have GDB installed and runnable by typing 'gdb' on the command line, download said build:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1204VG8Y-Wlq0ZK7mRVvtqy1FNlTFa4M6/view?usp=sharing

Extract it somewhere, cd to the new folder which contains a SoulseekQt.exe and type:

gdb SoulseekQt.exe

... to load it in GDB. Type 'run' to start the program, and then you basically need to Ctrl+C in the command line window when the pause is happening. GDB will give you a prompt, type 'thread 1' to navigate to the main thread and 'bt' to get a stack trace. If we're lucky it will show us where in the code the pause is happening. If you can get more than one stack trace even better. Send me what you have and I'll see if I can do something with that information.

Thanks, Nir