Viewer freezes or goes black

[Leo1452]

I use Firestorm. It seems to happen when I'm on a different window for a while, then come back. Edit: I've noticed that it seems to happen when I minimize it but not when I simply switch tabs. I'm still logged in, I can hear sounds, I can click tabs and HUDS, but the viewer window stops updating what I can see. If I try resizing the window, the whole thing goes black. After a few minutes of clicking around, it usually enters a "stopped responding" state. This started happening after an update, so I tried clean installing to an older version and it started happening again a day or two later.

I tried these https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/fs_graphics_crashes_and_glitches#viewer_freezing:

It happens even when I have barely anything else open. The viewer itself is usually the largest consumer of memory.
I'm not loading world or in mouselook when it happens.
I have 16.6 MB of chat logs, so I don't think that's causing it to freeze either.
I've set my Cache Size to 9984MB and Viewer Texture Memory Buffer to maximum.
I don't use AntiVirus software to whitelist on and have Windows Security set to default.
I've set Full Res Textures and Set FastCacheFetchEnabled to false.
It didn't occur to me until recently that some tasks in Task manager are marked "Suspended." Does that affect Firestorm and, if so, is there a way to stop it from suspending?

I also tried installing Alchemy Viewer and the same thing happened, so maybe it's my computer. The device I'm having issues on is an HP Laptop 15 with x64 bit, Windows 11, Intel Core i7 10th Gen, 7.70 GB of usable RAM, and Intel Iris Plus Graphics updated to the latest drivers for it. I know it's not the best, but Firestorm was working fine 2 months ago. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Edited May 18, 2023 by Leo1452
key detail

[Odaks]

Hi @Leo1452,

There's a great bunch of regular forum members with a lot of "been there, done it, got the t-shirt" experience that will cheerfully pop up with some ideas, I'm sure. Be patient; many will be in bed right now!

A bit more information will be needed though. Get this from your viewer's top bar menu; Help - About Firestorm and copy/paste all of that page into a posting here. If you can get this information while you're logged in, all the better (it will also give some info about the quality of your connection).

In the meanwhile, there is a suggestion that Windows Defender is running as a default. Have you checked that everything is properly whitelisted, if so? Firestorm gives super advice about this - https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting . Checking that all is propely covered with this is never a bad place to start!

You're right; integrated graphics aren't the best for SL but that alone shouldn't be the cause of the sort of problem you're describing.

[Leo1452]

13 hours ago, Odaks said:

Hi @Leo1452,

There's a great bunch of regular forum members with a lot of "been there, done it, got the t-shirt" experience that will cheerfully pop up with some ideas, I'm sure. Be patient; many will be in bed right now!

A bit more information will be needed though. Get this from your viewer's top bar menu; Help - About Firestorm and copy/paste all of that page into a posting here. If you can get this information while you're logged in, all the better (it will also give some info about the quality of your connection).

In the meanwhile, there is a suggestion that Windows Defender is running as a default. Have you checked that everything is properly whitelisted, if so? Firestorm gives super advice about this - https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting . Checking that all is propely covered with this is never a bad place to start!

You're right; integrated graphics aren't the best for SL but that alone shouldn't be the cause of the sort of problem you're describing.

Thank you for your response! Here's that page:

Firestorm 6.6.8 (68380) Jan  3 2023 19:59:43 (64bit / SSE2) (Firestorm-Releasex64) with Havok support
Release Notes

You are at 130.6, 170.1, 21.4 in Arapaima located at simhost-0b0044b35ad17335d.agni
SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Arapaima/131/170/21
(global coordinates 460,163.0, 306,602.0, 21.4)
Second Life Server 2023-05-05.579955
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1065G7 CPU @ 1.30GHz (1497.6 MHz)
Memory: 7880 MB
Concurrency: 8
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 11 64-bit (Build 22621.1702)
Graphics Card Vendor: Intel
Graphics Card: Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics
Graphics Card Memory: 1024 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 31.0.101.2121
OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 - Build 31.0.101.2121

RestrainedLove API: RLV v3.4.3 / RLVa v2.4.2.68380
libcurl Version: libcurl/7.54.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1l zlib/1.2.11.zlib-ng nghttp2/1.40.0
J2C Decoder Version: KDU v8.2
Audio Driver Version: FMOD Studio 2.02.09
Dullahan: 1.12.4.202209142021
  CEF: 91.1.21+g9dd45fe+chromium-91.0.4472.114
  Chromium: 91.0.4472.114
LibVLC Version: 3.0.16
Voice Server Version: Vivox 4.10.0000.32327.5fc3fe7c.571099

Settings mode: Firestorm
Viewer Skin: Firestorm (Grey)
Window size: 1366x697 px
Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)
Font Size Adjustment: 0 pt
UI Scaling: 1
Draw distance: 200 m
Bandwidth: 1500 kbit/s
LOD factor: 2
Render quality: Medium-High (4/7)
Advanced Lighting Model: Yes
Texture memory: 768 MB (1)
Disk cache: Max size 2048.0 MB (102.1% used)
Built with MSVC version 1934
Packets Lost: 0/3,255 (0.0%)
May 18 2023 11:08:01 SLT

[Aishagain]

@Leo1452  I see from the spec above that the i7 chip is very slow at 1.3GHz, that looks odd to me but I am not familiar with Laptop specs.  The only number in your settings that jumps out at me is the draw distance of 200m.  I'd keep that low if you can say to around 64m max, that way there's less for the graphic chip to be drawing. 

It's worth remembering that despite you having the viewer minimized, the viewer is still acting as though all the objects around it are in full view, so it's not as if it shuts down.

As Odaks says despite you only using the installed antivirus and threat software from Windows (Windows Defender) you must still specifically "whitelist" the viewer components as advised in the FS Wiki she gave the link to:

 https://wiki.firestormviewer.org/antivirus_whitelisting

If, having done the whitelisting as required this issue persists, I'd look at improving the cooling of your Laptop. There must be other wiser heads around here that can help you better.

[Leo1452]

Thank you for the replies. I've noticed that it's freezing when I minimize Firestorm. Naturally, if I switch tabs, no "animation" is played for minimization and nothing freezes. I've turned off minimization animations, but it still happens. Is there a solution to this? At least some way to force the viewer to refresh?

Edited May 18, 2023 by Leo1452
key detail

[Nalates Urriah]

The CPU is slow. I assume you are running on a laptop. You might get a bit better performance by keeping the laptop plugged into power and tuning Windows for performance. You can Google how to tune Windows.

Using the CPU's graphics means you will have low to moderate graphics quality in your rendering. Setting your graphics memory to the max may be a part of the problem. You only have 1GB assigned to graphics use. Windows is going to use part of that meaning you have something more like 500MB (0.5GB) available for the viewer. I would expect screen blinks, which may be long enough to look like freezes, as video memory gets swapped to disk.

You can try reducing the viewer's expectation of available video memory.

You can watch the Task Manager's Performance tab to see how many page faults are occurring when you run the viewer. If you are seeing a high rate of swaps, you have a memory shortage problem. You can look up your laptop model and see what the max memory limit is and maybe upgrade. CPU-Z (free) will let you see what is installed in the computer, including memory speed. If it is less than what your motherboard supports, you can upgrade.

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 5/18/2023 at 9:04 PM, Aishagain said:

I see from the spec above that the i7 chip is very slow at 1.3GHz, that looks odd to me but I am not familiar with Laptop specs.

Short of implementing it in a driver or raising the viewer requirements to run with admin privileges, Windoze does not offer any way to get the actual core frequency via C++ (or any other language) code. The best you can get is the Time Stamp Counter (TSC) frequency of the CPU, which is usually the ”base frequency” (even though the CPU cores can run at even lower frequencies than this) for that CPU, i.e. not the ”Turbo” one, which is likely the one actually in use by the CPU core on which the viewer code is running.

On 5/19/2023 at 9:10 PM, Nalates Urriah said:

Setting your graphics memory to the max may be a part of the problem.

Indeed, but it is not set to the max from what we can see in the quoted FS About info: Texture memory: 768 MB (1). The max would be 2048MB in FS, when not using the ”dynamic” memory setting, and would be way too much. I would expect this amount of ”texture memory” to be OK, since the total amount of RAM used would then be around 768MB (”VRAM”, which is actually RAM with an iGPU) + 1.5 * 768 (raw + decoded textures RAM) + frame and vertex buffers (around 512MB or so) + mesh data (another 512MB) + viewer footprint and data (around 2GB), meaning 5GB or so of RAM used by the viewer... Very tight, for a 8GB RAM computer (given that Windoze needs memory as well, likely around 1.5 GB), but OKeyish...

This said and of course, setting up the viewer for 512MB or ”texture memory” would make it even safer.

On 5/18/2023 at 4:28 AM, Leo1452 said:

Edit: I've noticed that it seems to happen when I minimize it but not when I simply switch tabs. 

This is likely the problem, and the result of how poorly the viewer (not just FS: the problem is in LL's code base itself) handles the newly arriving textures and objects while not actually rendering anything (i.e. while minimized). It then consumes a lot more memory than it should (because the level of detail for old textures is not re-evaluated and the textures are not re-decoded accordingly to fit the available memory).

Since I did a lot of work on texture memory management in my viewer, you could give a try to the Cool VL Viewer and see how it fares for you in the same conditions...

But I do not even offer any guarantees on it and can only recommend that you do not minimize viewers (any of them) for a long time, instead using the BackgroundYieldTime setting (set it to 100ms or so) to prevent the viewer from eating up your CPU power (and your battery autonomy) while its window is not in the foreground/active.

Edited May 21, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp