unresponsive under win7

[Sebastian Kowalski]

it doesnt matter if I have aero switched on or not, soft is unresponive, switching to other apps in the background or freezing up when running some heavier (even when they are running only on one thread) sims and/ or try to cache. and sometimes its not even writing the caches. its not crashing, it is coming back at some point (end of framerange)
is this something only my side, or is somebody experiencing the same?

its so frustrating!

s.

[Stephen Davidson]

Is there a lot of disk activity during the "not responding" ?

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[Andi Farhall]

All the time, I hate win7 but there now really only one alternative which I fear would be just as frustrating. I've just resigned myself being less productive whilst i watch soft go white.

A>

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[Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES]]

FWIW, I’ve experienced similar problems on Win 7, mostly related to Preview in SI 2013. An update of the graphics card driver reduced the lock ups dramatically.

 

--

Joey Ponthieux

LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES)

Mymic Technical Services

NASA Langley Research Center

__________________________________________________

Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not

represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

[Sam]

I’ve never seen anything like this in windows 7 and I have Aero turned on all the time. Most likely this is related to something system specific like your video card, or possibly a driver. You may also have some disk errors, or even malware/virus issues that are causing the problem. What kind of video cars and computers are you using?

[Chris Chia]

Hi Sebastian,
Could you give us some info? Like any repro steps? And what's your machine specs?
Also have you updated your graphics driver and cleared the XSI preference folder?


Regards,
Chris

[Sebastian Kowalski]

ive updated the gpu driver, lets see how softimage behaves today..
cant really repro that, kinda random behavior.
its a brand new hp z820 i am working on. but i had this flaws for some time now, on different machines.

well get back at you
s.

> <winmail.dat>

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

it's not necessarily unusual to get the "unresponsive" message if
you're doing "heavier sims and/ or try to cache" It might also worsen
if the file I/O is expensive, for example if you're writing to the
network of a compress/encrypted drive. The UI is not running in a
separate thread in XSI, so when it runs a sim it's taking breaks every
once in a while to process messages (especially for the Cancel button
on the progress bar), but those pauses can be too far in-between if
each frame is heavy.

Windows's window manager is putting up that message for any
application that stops processing windows messages for more than a
couple of seconds. It doesn't mean the application is hung and needs
to be killed. It just means it's hasn't redrawn its window and
processed mouse messages for a while.

[Martin yara]

Do you have any invalid source in your scene?

Martin

[Sebastian Kowalski]

i understand, but is this something i have to live with, or is there some kind of workaround?
like setting the win7 "not responding" threshold higher �
dont get me wrong, i understand that softimage has to process all that crap i told it to do (siming, caching ..)
but that not responding, not able to stop or the worst case not displaying/ caching when playing forward is not acceptable.
i use softimage as fx tool these days and mostly just waiting for the gui to come back is exhausting.

btw. updating the quadro driver helped a bit, the window switching is gone.

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

The problem should be fixed is in Sofitmage : having the progress
dialog in a separate thread, plus poll for the cancel button more
often, so that you can click cancel (although ICE may not be able to
cancel in the middle of a frame)

For the other problems, the "unresponsive" message windows gives is a
symptom, it isn't the cause of the problem. Is the problem that
windows is graying out Softimage's window? If so, the only
work-around for not is to ... browse the web/check mail on something
another machine. But if you want to try changing the "unresponsive"
time out value, you can try this (reboot after change)
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc978614.aspx

[Matt Lind]

Something really needs to be done about that clearing XSI preference folder workaround. We should never have to do that, yet it's the first suggestion for just about everything when something goes wrong. If defaults.xsipref is that fragile, then perhaps it should be redesigned to be less corruptible.


Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Chris Chia
Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 7:02 PM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: unresponsive under win7

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

the preferences file do not get corrupted, ever. It's just an ascii
file of values. The problem is people forgot what they have changed
and installed and that's a quick way to rule everything out.

[Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES]]

Admittedly this is not a phenomenon specific to Soft. In the early days of Maya the first course of action, recommended by support when we had bizarre issues, was to delete or rename the prefs directory. It often helped and having done this enough times and having manually edited the userPrefs script file several times I came to the conclusion that it was not a clear explanation to say that the userPrefs file was corrupt or the actual fault.

I think it's possible to suggest that settings saved in the file, that might otherwise be fine by themselves, when combined with other saved settings might have contributed to cause and effect. The point being that the problem potentially wasn't the contents of the prefs file itself or the file being corrupted somehow, but how or in what order some values were being saved and then reloaded that revealed obscure or bizarre issues in the software.

This is all hypothetically speaking, of course.

--
Joey Ponthieux
LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES)
Mymic Technical Services
NASA Langley Research Center
__________________________________________________
Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not
represent the opinions of NASA or any other party.

[Matt Lind]

I don't buy that.

I've had to clear out my preferences folder 4 times just in the past 6 weeks for various issues in 2013 SP1. I set very few preferences, and once they're set I don't touch them anymore. Yet weeks later performing this or that Softimage suddenly gets very flakey. Clearing out the preference folder seems to be the only workaround. This issue has been getting worse with each release. Most noticeably starting with 2010. We rarely had to do this in 7.5.

There is something wrong with how tools are reading/writing that file. I have noticed it's organized as <category.preference> = <value>, but the preference and '=' are separated by a tab instead of space. Is it possible there is code assuming it should be a space?


Matt

[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

Parsing a few strings separated by an equal sign once at the top of
the application isn't going to cause the app to get flaky. In 12 mil
lines of code, that's not where the complexity is. Anyway, that file
is ASCII, you can diff it, delete part of it until you find the
offending issue, etc. There shouldn't be a cargo cult around this
file. Now deleting the whole user folder.. that does clears a few
more complicated things, including perhaps some plug-ins, perhaps
image proxies and a spdl cache.

[Matt Lind]

OK, that at least narrows some things down.

All our plugins are in external workgroups.
SPDL cache....not sure what would tap into this. We do have some SPDL based shaders, but nothing else.
Not sure about image proxies. We don't use FXTree.

What I'm getting at is our environments are pretty consistent, but for some reason performing a given task in Softimage seems to throw a monkey wrench into everything. The problem is figuring out the cause as we cannot find a consistent trigger which we can reproduce. It has a very random feel to it. If there is something else we can try other than flushing the entire folder, that would be preferred as it's a real pain to have to reset preferences and everything else for a user each time this occurs.

[adrian wyer]

i think the key phrase was;

deleting the whole user folder.. that does clears a few more complicated
things, including perhaps some plug-ins, perhaps image proxies and a spdl
cache.

we regularly have to blow away someone's user folder to fix issues (like
once every couple of weeks on some machines)

having the ability to save keyboard mapping/preference files and import them
would certainly make this workaround easier to swallow!

a

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
[mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Matt Lind
Sent: 17 April 2013 19:56
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: RE: unresponsive under win7

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[Luc-Eric Rousseau]

You don't need to blow away the whole folder, it's just easier.. user
preferences and keyboard mapping are already separate files in the
preference folder. you can just copy them or write a script that
blows everything else.
if you keep the preference file though, remove the workgroup setting
in it if you're trying to debug a problem

[adrian wyer]

2014SP1 add button to safely offload user temp caches etc? whilst
maintaining workgroup/keyboard mapping/output format prefs etc

a

-----Original Message-----
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com
[mailto:softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Luc-Eric
Rousseau
Sent: 18 April 2013 14:37
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: unresponsive under win7

[Sandy Sutherland]

If find in these cases if I rename the folder, then when a new one is
made I can go and retrieve bits and pieces out of the old one to get
back certain stuff.

S.