"Not responding"

millzey13

Active member
Hi, The last 4 days (i believe since latest updates were installed) ive been struggling with PI just not responding during tasks and just hanging.

This seems to mainly happen when using scritps but also just in general use, anyone else having issues? ive searched the forum and cant see much.

Win 10
32gb corsair vengeance ram with i7

thanks

Dan
 
no issues from my side (Windows 10 & Kubuntu on i5 with 16gb RAM) ... have you checked disk space?
 
seems this is only when using scripts... any ideas anyone? it ends up completing if i leave it but it just hangs for a while advising "not responding "
 
@Pleiades are you able to advise who i can contact ref this at all please? every script is hanging and not responding. even with the new star net++ "faster" work round its still hanging and then finally finishing after 2 mins. its doing this with all scripts i use and quite frustrating
many thanks
 
Have you looked at resources in Windows task manager - you may have some sort of resource lock with another (non-PI) program.
 
Hi Fred, no everything seems fine to me?
 

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Dan.

From the information provided it is almost impossible to suggest anything definite, you appear to be the only user out of many hundreds experiencing this issue so it is something specific to your computer.

In your opening post of the thread you state that the problem appeared after the recent updates.
Which updates are you referring to, Windows 10 or PixInsight?

For Windows 10 updates there have been reported problems across the internet that after each major Windows build is released (1903 to 1909, 1909 to 2004 etc) that disk re-indexing following the OS update sucks up CPU resources and the computer runs tasks slowly.
If there are many Gb of data stored on the system then re-indexing of the drive(s) can reduce the performance of the computer considerably for several days following an OS update. The MS recommendation is to leave the computer switched on but idle for a day or so to allow re-indexing to complete.

If you are processing large amounts of data and continually creating and deleting files then re-indexing never completes and in this scenario the recommendation is to switch search indexing off in Windows. This does mean that if you want to use search services in Windows then each search will take longer but otherwise there are benefits for computer performance if search indexing is disabled for data intensive applications.

In some cases, where many Gb of data are continually being created and deleted (which is normal for PixInsight) the Windows search index file (.edb) becomes so fragmented and bloated that it severely impacts on computer performance and in this case the .edb file should be deleted and indexing disabled, you can find instructions how to to do this via a web search for instructions.

If your computer CPU supports hyper-threading check in BIOS that hyper-threading is enabled.

For maximum performance with PixInsight where disk swap is an integral part of the processing model it is important that disk encryption is not used. Several of our students here have enabled bit-locker disk encryption by accident and then complained that their application software is running slower, check that disk encryption has not been enabled on your system.

In PixInsight check the threading settings, open the PixInsight Global Preferences window (top toolbar > Edit > Global Preferences>, click the 'Parallel Processing and Threads' tab and click the 'Load Default Page Settings' button then apply global (click the round blue dot, bottom left in the window).
While still in the Global Preferences window click the Directories and Network tab and check that your swap folders are set correctly and that Swap File Compression is not enabled.

Reboot PixInsight after making any changes in Global Preferences for those changes to become enabled.

If you have third party AV software installed, temporarily disable the AV software and test to see if that is impacting performance when running scripts.

Lastly, for Windows 10, check the integrity of the base OS by running the Windows DISM and sfc \scannow tools as described here:


Other than the above I can't think of anything else to suggest, PixInsight is running scripts normally on my Windows 10 (2004 build), macOS Catalina and Linux systems, all running the current and up-to-date versions of PixInsight.

William.
 
Many thanks for the response William its greatly appreciated

Ref the above i have actually tried most of these options, i ran the dsim last night and no faults were found. I did however clear a lot from hard drives that was unnecessary to gather more space (although as mentioned prior space isnt an issue)

I have also enabled 4 swap directories as mine only had one from default and that has put my benchmark scores up a lot higher.

the updates i was referring to were pixinsight ones, i dont have any problems with any other programs on my system, my system is pretty good and fast to say the least, i work from home so the computer is being tested and used most of the day every day wihtout issue. The only time it hangs is when using scripts, nothing else... and this didnt happen prior to two weeks ago when processing my last target this is why im stumped.

i dont think i have enabled bit-locker disk encryption but i will check, i think if i had i wouldnt get the benchmark results that i do, also as i say other then scripts its fine.
 
Dan.

One of my colleagues here mentioned having to carry out a full de-install, disk clean-up and re-install of PixInsight following problems caused when she installed a standalone copy of Java for Windows.

PixInsight includes it’s own Java script engine, SpiderMonkey from Mozilla I think, and they should coexist peacefully but Windows wasn’t happy having both the standalone Java and PixInsight’s Java engine installed. On her system PixInsight was crashing, so not the same problem you have but maybe something to check if it applies.

With our faculty still under lockdown there aren’t any other staff or students around today to ask for suggestions, I‘m out of ideas for now, hopefully someone else will be along with the answer.

William.
 
Dan.

One of my colleagues here mentioned having to carry out a full de-install, disk clean-up and re-install of PixInsight following problems caused when she installed a standalone copy of Java for Windows.

PixInsight includes it’s own Java script engine, SpiderMonkey from Mozilla I think, and they should coexist peacefully but Windows wasn’t happy having both the standalone Java and PixInsight’s Java engine installed. On her system PixInsight was crashing, so not the same problem you have but maybe something to check if it applies.

With our faculty still under lockdown there aren’t any other staff or students around today to ask for suggestions, I‘m out of ideas for now, hopefully someone else will be along with the answer.

William.


Thank you will appreciate the help, this i think will be my last resort, just due to the fact its only script related.

I've had another suggestion given on a thread I joined in on where someone had the same issue. Ill see if that works first.

Clear skies
 
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