I’ve had a few crashes with Gig Performer lately just by doing simple things like changing rack spaces. I’ve been sending the crash reports through. I’ve noticed the Surface Pro is quite hot at the time of the crash. Can anyone explain the significance of this heat build up for me please?
What plugins are you trying to run on the surface pro and what sort of cpu power is it using. I also have a surface pro but strictly as a remote to my more powerful rack mount pc and no issues.
I use about 5 or 6 plugins per rackspace on average, with Real Guitar being featured in every rackspace. It’s hard to judge my cp useage as it always shows 100% due to some sort of clash between Real Guitar and Gig Performer (both developers know of this). My main concern is that I cannot hear the Surface Pro 6 fan come on when it gets hot. I can’t feel air coming out either. I presume it has a fan? Could the fan be faulty? The heat seems to be associated with the crashes.
What does your cpu sit around when not using real guitar. I would say a surface pro cpu would be under stress alot trying to use it to run your plugins.
I live in a dusty area. My Surface Pro alll of a sudden started making a horrible fan noise. Also, it gets very hot. Cleaning the dust helped with the noise, though. Now, the screen is popping out of the case. The battery was expanding. I am looking into getting an Intel Nuc as my DAW machine.
Robin at Moulten Music (on YTube) ran extensive tests on a Surface Pro 6 a year ago and found it to be suitable for making music.
In the video I do not see him playing live with demanding plugins or did I miss something?
Well, it’s been a year since I watched it, so maybe he was just using it with a DAW. I need to say that the heat build up comes (that is if it happens) usually after an extended session of several hours without break, as I am still in the process of programming new songs. I did play at a Farmers Market last Saturday for 3 hours with no problems. I am going to give the Surface a dust blow out as I have been using for a year now since new, so hopefully that may help.
On my Surface pro (4, with an I5) I can’t hear the fan when it comes on. I can feel the airflow out of the side, though. It blows pretty good when it gets hot.
Not all Surface pro’s have fans, though. When I bought mine the lower speed CPU model didn’t have a fan.
What model is your Surface Pro?
As for the heat build up, it’s clearly because either the CPU, the graphics chip, or both are running near full capacity. Work = heat. If it’s only crashing when it gets hot, I would say there is a very high likelihood that heat is the direct cause of your crashes, and that’s not good for the longevity of the system.
If you hit alt-control-delete, click on “task manager” and then click on the Performance tab of the task manager window you will see CPU usage in real time. If you right click on that graph you can change it to show each of your “logical cores” individually. That will give you the best idea of what is actually going on in terms of processor use when you have everything running.
On the left part of that window you can see CPU, memory, disk, network, and GPU utilization. If any of those are running near 100% under your normal audio workload then you’re going to have problems.
I’ll check out your suggestions Vindes over the weekend and report back.
Otherwise, it looks like a new rebuild of Windows is looming for me. I was playing at a rest home yesterday using a 19 song set. I called up the 4th song (rackspace) and the dreaded “Gig Performer has stopped working” message appeared. Fortunately, the GP reload was quick and the rest of the set went fine. Still annoying though. The Surface wasn’t hot after only 3 songs. I’ve been getting the same messages with GP stopping all week. I’ve been sending the crash reports through and would love to have a report back as to what is happening, but have had no feedback at all. Is it GP at fault, or is it Windows? How do I find out? What is the purpose of the crash reports? Do they pin point the cause of the trouble? I’ll hold off the Windows rebuild until I get a report (hopefully) on what is causing GP to crash like this so regularly.
I don’t understand this — GP has been working for you all the time and then “out of the blue” it just stopped working? Nothing else changed?
Not entirely out of the blue. I have had extensive help from you guys, but this is not the first time that either Windows or GP has gone “Off”. The last Windows rebuild was in September, and I’ve done the same at least twice more before that this year. I don’t know what’s going on and why I can’t get stability out of what I have. My previous Surface was an Pro 4 i5 with 8 gig ram, and this new one is an i7 with 16 gig of ram about a year old. If the crash reports that I’ve sent in could be analysed, then perhaps I could find where the problem is. No, nothing was changed. I just sit at home seeing I’m retired, and just program songs. I usually manage two a day before I get bogged down with “creativity loss”. I change nothing while I’m programming. Sometimes I can go 6 hours just fine, and then last night, just 20 minutes before GP faulted.
And you mentioned that it was getting hot. Beginning to sound like flaky drivers or faulty hardware. Makes absolutely no sense that GP would just be dying like that. It would be happening to many users but you’re the only one I know of reporting this kind of ongoing issue.
Ok. Should I go back to the supplier and have the machine tested? Any chance of finding out if the crash reports have revealed anything amiss? I do have the machine running on performance mode, so perhaps I should set that back to balanced to see if that helps? It could allow the machine to run cooler.
Dunno – we’re not in a position to give you official technical guidance on managing your hardware. I can give you my personal opinion, i.e. it seems like there might be a problem with your hardware, based on your description of what’s happening, but that’s really all I can say. It could be a device driver, your auxiliary hardware, an intermittent problem with some plugin, something else changed, many possibilities. But if GP was breaking the way you describe, we would expect to be receiving many hundreds of similar reports.
I’m curious about the crash reports. I sent maybe six? Are you able to report on any of those?
I haven’t seen them. To where did you send them?
I just filled in the spaces, added my email and sent them. Was there more to do?
What version of Gig Performer are you running?
The very latest released just a few days ago.