Holy Smokes! Crashariffic!

OK, I haven't posted this without trying a few things as it's an odd one, but it's only happening with SecondLife since 1.3.3 (I use the same computer for work, and am having no problems with that).

Basically, SecondLife is freezing and then my computer is turning off. Since 1.3.3 I've managed a max of about 10 minutes online before this happens. I have changed the power supply and the memory. I've updated to DirectX 9.0b as suggested in the release notes. I have also changed network cards but still it happens and only if I've got SecondLife running. In between times I've been working with lots of apps open etc. without a problem.

So, basically, I can't use SecondLife at the moment. I've submitted 2 crash reports which will hopefully make sense to someone there. I've never had any problems like this with SecondLife before, so I'm flummoxed as to what's going on. Crashing to desktop I can understand, freezing I can understand but crashing to the point where my computer just thinks 'I've had enough' and turns itself off is something new to me.

Any help, advice etc. I'd appreciate it!

** deleted **

It freaked me out until I realised that it was only when I'm running SecondLife and after I'd changed most of the kit in the machine!

See here I am, a good 30 mins or so later and I've not crashed one. I bet if I put on SecondLife though...

Mooph, it looks like your drivers for your motherboard are out of date - you're running an nForce 2, and it looks like you're running drivers from 2002. I believe there was another thread where Devlin Gallant was having similar issues?

In any case, you should go to nVidia's web site and grab the drivers for your nForce board.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_3.13

Let me know if that fixes your problems or not - if so, I'll add it to our driver autodetector on startup...

- Doug

You might also want to find out what BIOS updates are available. Devlin's problem was that he hadn't applied a patch to allow him to use his MSI K7N2 Delta motherboard with his GeForce FX5900 video card. It's possible that your problem could be similar. ...or if those are your motherboard and video card specs exactly, I can save you some time and tell you to just download this file.

Thank you Doug and Catherine for your advice. I have followed both pieces but, unfortuantely, I'm finding that 1.3.3 is still crashing for me within a few minutes of going in-world - in the same way as well, freeze then computer turns off.

I'm really at a loss here to know what's wrong. Before 1.3.3 everything was peachy, never a crash, nothing. As soon as 1.3.3 came out this started happening.

Any help anybody can give would be greatly appreciated.

Doug, sorry, forgot to put in that last message - I've submitted crash reports as well from the crashes today since following the suggestions on this thread.

Hmm, looks like your AGP drivers are up to date now - your nVidia drivers are a bit stale, though - you're running the 52.16 drivers. I don't THINK it'll make a difference, though.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_56.72

If you've already tried swapping out other hardware, I might try experimenting with cooling - i.e., your graphics card may be overheating.

I believe that the newer nVidia cards have thermal sensors in them, as well - the readout is accessible from the control panel.

- Doug

Doug, OK I'm going to tentatively say that this has solved it as I've been in world for about 30 mins this morning and didn't crash once. However, all my settings are currently low so I'll try again later with more of the display settings enabled.

But, it's looking good *fingers crossed* *touch wood* etc. etc.

Thanks for all your help.

Doug, I spoke too soon. I turned on the following:

Local Lighting
Object Bump
Avatar Rendering: Bump Mapped & Cloth

(Anisotropic Filtering was already enabled)

And when I clicked Apply I crashed again in the same way. I'm going to try one option at a time and see if I can isolate what it is that's causing it.

Interestingly, when I restarted SL after my computer had booted again none of those changed settings had been saved.

Also, when I restarted SL, I used the preferences button on the main login screen to turn on Local Lighting. I think connected and when I got online the screen was grey as if I'd been logged out - maybe a bug in the way the preferences are handled if changed from the main login screen?

Anyway, I'll update you on progress.

OK, curiouser and curiouser said Alice. I've gone through turning each of the options on one at a time and staying in world for 5/10 mins each time, and here I am in-world with the settings I've always had before 1.3.3 and I don't seem to be crashing. I'm going to leave SL running in the background (as I often do) so it's running continuously for quite a while - I'll fly around and stuff as well which is what I've been doing for the last 10 minutes without a problem so far.

If all goes well it would appear that I only crashed after updating the nVidia drivers when I changed all three options at once and clicked Apply. If all doesn't go well, I'll bang my head against a wall and try going through the options again.

*crosses fingers, toes and eyes *

The only advice I can offer is to make sure your memory timing options are set correctly in your BIOS. It could be that the newest SL client might be doing something that crosses a threshold where improper timing could be causing a lockup.

There's a high probability that it's something else though.

Thanks for the advice Joe but since updating the nVidia drivers and slowly setting each Display option in SL on one at a time I'm now happy in SL and it's not crashed once since my last post.

Do you remember the EXACT place and direction you were at when you crashed after turning on those options? Perhaps it's something in your visual range + those options coming on that caused the problem.

Yes, the same place as I was when I turned them all on at once. Something is obviously different with 1.3.3 as I never had the problem before but I'm happy now that it seems to be resolved.

Hmmm....ok, I'm going to have to retract my happiness that it's all working without crashes - SL is still crashing for me very regularly. After the last time I'd posted I'd manged to be in-world for an hour or so, then logged off. However, since then I've been having crashes every 10 - 30 minutes by my calculations. I did an event last night and crashed 5 times whilst trying to host it.

I've been monitoring motherboard, CPU and graphics card temperature and none of those are overheating (didn't think they would be due to the cooling I have in this PC). I've updated the bios on the motherboard, the graphics card drivers and DirectX. I've changed power supply and memory. And still SL is crashing - but nothing else is.

Some interesting correlations that may be relevant came out of my event last night. Each time I crashed at least one other person crashed as well with one of those mangled data message thingies. They crashed to the desktop, I crashed out completely, computer turning off each time, and didn't get a mangled data message obviously

I'm at a bit of a loss now - I can use my computer happily without any crashes (which I do everyday for my work) unless I run SL, which leads me to think it's SL, especailly as this has only started happening with 1.3.3 - to reiterate, before 1.3.3 I was a happy little lamb that never crashed once. Now I'm still crashariffic.

I'd really appreciate some help LL as this is driving me round the twist.

I am still having the same problem Moopf. I haven't completely upgraded all the possible drivers on my motherboard yet, least ways I don't THINK I have> I don't know how to tell. But, whenever I crash, the program in windows XP that asks if you want to report the crash to Microsoft tells me that the InVidia graphics drivers are at fault. I do have the latest graphics card drivers, but I don't know if the drivers on the chip in the motherboard are the the ones it is referring to. Maybe that can help you isolate the problem?

BTW I have the MSI FX5950 card. Colin was saying something about the NForce2, again not sure what he was referring too.

Devlin-

NForce2 is an Nividia Chipset motherboard

However, for both yourself and Moopf, can you do me a favor and run a defragment analysis on your hard drive and tell me both the free space left on it as well as how fragmented it is?

Thanks

Colin

Colin, please find analysis below for my computer. Hehe, it does actually look pretty fragmented now I come to look at it. Do you want me to just defrag it? I don't mind waiting if you need to run some other tests first (don't want to ruin any possible test bed for you!):

Volume Local Disk (C
Volume size = 76.32 GB
Cluster size = 4 KB
Used space = 30.44 GB
Free space = 45.88 GB
Percent free space = 60 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 17 %
File fragmentation = 34 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 152,259
Average file size = 271 KB
Total fragmented files = 17,968
Total excess fragments = 101,482
Average fragments per file = 1.66

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 1.50 GB
Total fragments = 1

Folder fragmentation
Total folders = 9,968
Fragmented folders = 845
Excess folder fragments = 5,334

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 195 MB
MFT record count = 162,770
Percent MFT in use = 81 %
Total MFT fragments = 7

Moopf:

/me said in my best Mad scientist voice

Thanks. Please go ahead and defrag. I'm working on a theory about some of our lag issues and mangled data issues having to do with file fragmentation and want to see if this helps.

Actually, it might explain a problem I was having earlier too at Seacliff. I spoke to a Linden, but he could see no problem at the time, and I've not emailed support yet...

But basically... I was in Seacliff earlier today. I was slowing down all the time, then the client just froze... No crash message, nothing... just froze. "Not Responding" in the task mangler etc.

Anyway, killed and logged back in... but same happened as I got in...

I cleared the cache... no effect.

I reinstalled SL over the top... no effect.

I reinstalled SL clean... no effect.

I then logged in at home, and everything was fine until my friends in Seacliff teleported me back... and suddenly I was frozen again.

So, just me... and from what I can see, just one sim.

My HD's not particularly fragmented... but it's not perfect either.

So I wondered was Seacliff behaving - not badly as such - but different enough that I was getting bad data?

Here is mine.

Volume Local disk (C)
Volume size: 115GB
Cluster Size: 4KB
Used Space: 16.13GB
Free Space: 98.89GB
Percent Free Space: 85%

Volume Fragmentation
Total Fragmentation: 9%
File Fragmentation: 19%
Free space Frag: 0%

File Fragmentation
Total Files: 43,028
Average File Size: 544KB
Total Frag'd Files: 3,011
Total Ecess Frags: 31,125
Average Frags per file: 1.72

Pagefile Fragmentation
Pagefile Size: 3.00GB
Total Frags: 1

Folder Fragmentation
Total Folders: 2,233
Frag'd Folders: 77
Excess Folder Frags: 753

MFT Fragmentation
Total MFT Size: 59MB
MFT Record Count: 45,493
Percent MFT In Use: 75
Total MFT Frags: 2

Welp, since my performance is in the toilet (I sent a bug report saying as much, and even specifically mentioning Seacliff, which should be massively bug free... I mean just LOOK at those sim FPS!)... Here's mine.

Is the fact that my page file is fragmented into 30K+ bits a bad thing? </sarcasm>

I -really- need to defragment this thing.


Volume (C:)
Volume size = 112 GB
Cluster size = 512 bytes
Used space = 103 GB
Free space = 8.54 GB
Percent free space = 7 %

Volume fragmentation
Total fragmentation = 12 %
File fragmentation = 24 %
Free space fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 214,871
Average file size = 588 KB
Total fragmented files = 16,575
Total excess fragments = 574,198
Average fragments per file = 3.67

Pagefile fragmentation
Pagefile size = 2.00 GB
Total fragments = 30,142

Folder fragmentation
Total folders = 11,401
Fragmented folders = 116
Excess folder fragments = 531

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 242 MB
MFT record count = 234,810
Percent MFT in use = 94 %
Total MFT fragments = 657

FYI, if you need a free pagefile defragmenter (which the Windows defragmenter does NOT do), I recommend the following.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/pagedefrag.shtml

In fact, sysinternals contains many useful utilities that I have used many times both for development and application debugging.

- Doug

Why THANK you! I didn't realize Windows was that evil.