I built a dual Xeon workstation to take advantage of PI's parallel processing. A Mac user for 40 years, Windows for data acquisition, recently I installed Fedora 29 / xfce on the workstation and saw a large increase in PixInsight benchmark scores, which I posted to the Benchmarks page less than a week ago.
I've been experimenting with short subexposures, e.g., 5 s, without autoguiding. That means I must process hundreds to thousands of subexposures, so I was excited that the new SFS process is so much faster than the script.
When I add, e.g., 1097 frames, the Add Files panel lists all files, but the numbering goes up to only 999 and dots are shown instead of numbers for the rest of the files. Measurement of 1097 frames takes only 6 m 46 s on the new workstation. However when I grabbed the left side of the Measurement window to drag it wider to see more detail in the graph, I could move it only a little, then the computer suddenly turned off. No shutdown sequence - the screen went black, the fans stopped running, and the power button light went off, as if I had pulled the power cord.
In several more reboots and tries with SFS, the response was different sometimes. The computer remained running and the mouse pointer moved, but PI and Fedora become unresponsive to mouse clicks. I must kill the computer with the power button.
One time, when I tried to increase the size of the graph window, a Problem Reporting window appeared. It showed 6 entries, the last of which was "xorg-x11-drv-nouveau" and "System Failure", with a longer message that read "Unexpected system error. The system has encounterd a problem and recovered. Name: kernel-core. Version: 4.20.13-200.fe29.x89_64" However the computer was unresponsive, as described above.
I tried SFS after rebooting again, this time with 982 files, short of the 999 files where higher frame numbers would not be shown. There was no change in behaviour, so 999 is not a magic number.
At this point I was too bloody tired, confused by an increasingly wonky computer, and no longer took notes. Eventually I re-installed Fedora 29 and PI, but the system seemed unstable and I could never got SFS to work. I tried Xubuntu - same problem. It happens only with SFS, and only when I try to resize the Measurement window. I have not tried to continue with the selection and weighting process without resizing the window because I need to see what is going on with hundreds of frames before selecting and weighting.
