Cool VL Viewer forum

I did some research today.

Looks like this is quit a common problem with other third-party viewers (the crashing related to textures). Various workarounds/potential fixes are discussed on those viewer's forums (fora?).

Anyway, I've disabled HTTP Get Textures and so far so good. No crashing as yet, but then it's maybe too soon to tell for sure.

The issue of some textures being permanently blurred still remains, although I have discovered that teleporting out of sim and back again fixes things (rather than a full relog).

I'll post back if the Viewer crashes again with HTTP Get Textures disabled.

Nicola

Try today's release (v1.25.0.17) since it could solve your problem (though, so far and AFAIK, you are the only person encountering it).

Thanks Henri.
Disabling HTTP textures seem to have done the trick so far.

Other Third-party viewer forums have quite a few similar messages about this type of crash.

To be honest, it's not such a priority at the moment - the latest server update has broken quite a few scripts and much of my inventory doesn't rez either. Tickets and Jira have been submitted but I'm lind of restricted in SL for now!

Thanks again.

Nicola

Edit: I just installed today's update, logged in and enabled Get HTTP tectures. Crashed within seconds. So, for whatever reason, I would say that Get HTTP textures is the cause of my crashes. I'll leave it off. Never noticed any difference anyway (apart from the crashing of course!).

Oops!
Crashed again.
I was in edit mode, positioning an object (I crashed before when doing this previously)

Edit; And just re-logged and crashed again within seconds.

This is such a shame. I love the Cool VL Viewer, but I'm going to have to find an alternative. This repeated crashing is becoming really tiresome.

From the log, it looks like the viewer crashed on reception of an IM, which means it is unrelated with the previous reports in this thread.

Alas, since Windows can't produce proper stack trace (under Linux we get a stack_trace.log which allows to spot exactly where the crash occurred), it is unlikely I will ever find the reason for this particular crash unless I encounter it myself one day or another.

Thanks.
As I said in my first post, I had no crashes for years using Cool VL Viewer 1.23.
Since installing 1.25 I've had multiple crashes. It may be a co-incidence, but...

I hate to say this, but ... we don't. Well, I don't seem to, anyway.

Ever since I started running 1.25 in earnest (I refrained from doing so as long as I could, due to the known bugs, e.g. the RenderVolumeLOD issue that you pointed out etc.), I am getting frequent, seemingly random crashes myself. Whereas 1.23.5.36 would crash maybe once a week on me, 1.25.0.17 crashed me three times in the previous four hours alone.

The log does not indicate anything specific -- there is no indication of anything wrong or, even for that matter, a crash handler being called. The stack_trace.log contains a "0" followed by three blanks, and that's it. This is on Ubuntu 10.04.

On a (probably) unrelated note, I am observing severe client-side stalls occasionally (from sub-second to, in bad cases, several seconds) where the entire processing freezes -- no frame updates, no network communications -- and then picks up again. This does seem content dependent, I seem to be able to always observe it at the Strapped mall in the Calintreau region. Again, I can find no indication of anything amiss in the log and 1.23.5.36 does not show these issues.

Suffice it to say that currently I am not a happy camper. I am tempted to give up on 1.25 again and go back to 1.23 for as long as it can still serve me reasonably well. But obviously with all the current developments in SL, its useful lifespan will obviously be very short.

(Going off topic here: actually I also see that for 1.25 -- while I admire your excellent work, I just don't see you as a single individual being able to put in enough work quickly enough to keep up with the faster pace. And I seriously hope I am wrong.)

So, any ideas what might be happening here that's causing these (seemingly) spontaneuous aborts without crash handler log output or a decent stack trace being written? As for the stalls, could this be some odd temporary synchronisation issue between the texture decoding and the main thread of execution? Any further input on what to watch out for would be appreciated.

Love,
Lia

@Amalia

If you got crashes, please post the logs (even only SecondLife.log if you don't get a full stack trace), else I can't investigate *at all*... The viewer runs rock solid on my system, just like v1.23.5 did and I never crash (only the occasional disconnection whenever my ADSL link goes down).

Note also that the crashes may happen elsewhere than in the viewer itself, such as in the video drivers (and in this case the stack trace.log might indeed miss entirely or get truncated or corrupted), which could explain the difference you see between v1.23.5 and v1.25.0 (not the same pipeline renderer and therefore different OpenGL calls being issued) and the fact the viewer crashes for you and not for me... The stalls you describe is typical of video issues (either hardware overheating or driver problems): watch your /var/log/messages for bus errors and such when it happens...
For example, Nvidia recently corrected a crash bug for multi-threaded OpenGL apps (such as the viewer) in their driver: if you got anything before v260.19.21 with recent Xorg (v1.6 or later: v1.4 was OK), then you will experience such crashes and system 'hiccups'/stalls.

I'd been getting the same freezing problem. No crashes, but freezes for up to a second and jerky motion at times. It turns out my driver was six months old and as soon as i updated to the current nVidia driver the problem went away. My frames per second improved too . I'm back to rock solid, smooth as silk Cool VL Viewer like i was used to on the 1.23 branch. So definitely check that you have the current drivers.

I am using the latest drivers.
Anway, I've switched to Imprudence to test if that crashes as much as 1.25.