Intermittent Crash - Debug

Gig Performer on Windows
1

Hi. I changed my laptop and reinstalled GP with the latest version. I’ve made a couple of minor changes to plugins but nothing much.

Win 11, latest updates and it’s a Dell Alienware M18.

Today my main GP instance froze up. Task Manager wouldn’t open and I couldn’t right click and close GP. It ignored all attempts.

It froze once near when I started playing and later after playing for 30 minutes and then taking a break (leaving it on) and then resuming playing. GP opens fine initially and I’ve not had problems playing at home - this was when I took it out and about.

I had to log out to terminate the process and then log in and reload.

I checked in appdata local for GP logs. The folders are there but no crash logs. Also no clues in Windows logs either.

It’s going to be tedious to diagnose by disabling one plugin at a time as it can be stable for ages and then suddenly hang.

Any ideas on debugging ?

Thanks
Andy

2

I am clueless…but does it freeze when you are on certain rackspace or one with specific plugins?

3

I really only use one rack space and then enable or disable various plugins using widgets or scripts. That’s because we don’t tend to follow any real song order - it’s more spontaneous. But in this case, I hadn’t made any changes to which plugins were enabled at the moment it froze. It feels more like a buggy plugin or driver. But the fact it only affected one gp instance and not the second I had going suggests a vst and not a system driver.

4

Did you make sure the sleep-modes etc. were turned off? There are some helpful guidelines in the Windows optimization guide:

5

Good shout. Yes, I’ve followed the guide and tuned off as much as I can find. Dell has their own power management tool which takes over some settings. Will have another play in case that’s affecting it.

6

To me, this suggests an operating system issue.

1 Like
7

Have you looked what the event viewer tells? Maybe your disk is having trouble. Disk errors should show up in the system events log.

8

To confirm: your posts suggest GP is hanging/not responding, rather than a crash?
Are you using any virtual midi ports to communicate between the GP instances?

9

Could be - though it seems to be linked to GP or its plugins doing something. Will keep digging.

10

Yes. Nothing obvious. There are a couple of volume shadow service errors but I’ve seen those randomly on many systems. I will correct that in case though.

11

Interesting question. Yes, GP definitely hangs and doesn’t complete the crash process. I am using LoopBE to shuffle midi between instances. Occasionally I get odd messages from it about being connected to itself but I know it isn’t.

Any ideas on how virtual midi might cause errors ?

12

The only time GP has hanged is when I’ve unintentionally caused a midi feedback loop.
You would have to share details of how you’re sending midi using the virtual ports.

13

Are you using any MIDI In OMNI blocks?

14

I agree that shadow service errors will not prove to be the cause of your problem.

15

In that case taskmanager will show that GP is using cpu about equal to 1 core of your system (simplified: 100% divided by the number of cpu threads)

16

I think you may be right. I’ve cleaned up some MIDI blocks I wasn’t using and made sure LoopBE can’t be an input on the instance where it’s sending. So far, no crashes.

17

No, I don’t believe so. Just specific devices.