drizleintegration crash

[ppeake]

 50 image files, get to around 10 then crashes.
Crash info attached.

Tried twice.

System info:

  Model Name:   MacBook Pro
  Model Identifier:   MacBookPro15,1
  Processor Name:   Intel Core i7
  Processor Speed:   2.6 GHz
  Number of Processors:   1
  Total Number of Cores:   6
  L2 Cache (per Core):   256 KB
  L3 Cache:   9 MB
  Memory:   32 GB
  Boot ROM Version:   220.240.2.0.0 (iBridge: 16.16.3133.0.0,0)

[ppeake]

Interesting ... the third attempt finished.
I went to save the image, and it crashed!

[pfile]

is this the very latest macbook pro? it might be overheating.

see this thread:

https://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=13122.0

rob

[pfile]

oh ha, i see you posted in that thread. well, undoubtedly it is the same problem. if i remember right, these new macbooks were reported to have bad peak performance and eventually apple said they had a bug in their thermal profile for the machine, and relaxed it. but it sounds like they relaxed things too much, cause this is the second macbook15 that is overheating during DrizzleIntegration.

probably you should open a ticket with apple; there really is nothing a user should ever be able to do from the keyboard that causes the machine to overheat and crash this way. if it can't dissipate enough heat it should keep slewing the processor temperature/voltage down until the temperature drops...

rob

[Juan Conejero]

Yes, as Rob has pointed out, this is a duplicate of an already reported problem.

I also have a 2018 MacBook Pro where I can reproduce the very same problem consistently. I have managed to solve it, also consistently, by improving air flow at the back of the laptop's chassis. In my case, this can be achieved with a small wooden wedge placed under the chassis' rear side to separate it a few centimeters from the table. With this simple change I manage to drizzle integrate 100 files, but the laptop becomes very hot, so much that I don't want to repeat this test very often... Mine is a core i9 with 32 GiB of RAM.

There is no bug at all here. This is just a machine-specific thermal dissipation issue.

[ppeake]

Well, I wondered about that.

So I kept an eye on the CPU core temperatures. There is very little thermal inertia there. At the sampling rate m monitoring has, there were some spikes, but none really excessive, and as I mentioned above, the last crash was AFTER integration finished, and temps had dropped, when I went t save the image.

Next time it worked again, and I saved the image with no problem.

It probably IS the same problem. Mine is a newer CPU with 6 cores rather than 4.

Following The advice in the previous thread, I have turned off half of my CPU threads. :-(
Let's see how that goes.

I think I will open a support ticket with Apple, just to see what their response is.

[Juan Conejero]

I think they already know this happens. The problem here, IMHO, is that such a thin laptop chassis is very problematic for heat dissipation. This is not a practical problem for most applications, but PixInsight is different from most of them because, with its default configuration, it has been designed to squeeze the last drop of processing power from your machine, or possibly more than that

Lowering the number of logical processors to 6 instead of 12 in PixInsight, that is, limiting it to the number of physical cores, will degrade performance somewhat but nothing dramatic. And it most likely will allow you process even huge data sets without problems. Granted, a pricey one, but it's a laptop, after all.