FG Freezing

[Pharo]

I've been chasing down a "freezing" issue with FG for months now. I think I've isolated it to a DirectX 9 issue of some kind but updating the drivers doesn't seem to help.

Is anyone aware of an issue with running MSI Afterburner in background at the same time as FG? I use it for my more demanding games but it runs by default. Not that I need it for FG for any reason.

[LordEntrails]

My son runs MSI Afterburner while using FG as a client. Not that one data point means too much :(

When FG freezes, what does that mean? What is is last trying to do? What is the process size as shown with Task Manager? How many players are connected?

[Pharo]

The session becomes completely unresponsive. Actually completely unresponsive isn't 100% true, if i type /console, even though i dont see it in the chat window the console pops up. I haven't been able to get a consistant cause. Its happened while in the middle of a gaming session and moving a token across a map, thats been open for the last hour. Its happens when ive only had it opend for 5 mins and all I've done so far was open a story session to start writing. I've gotten lots of advise on other forum posts for memory management, to reduce my maps sizes, number of tokens loaded, etc but nothing seems to affect it and there seems to be no rhyme or reason. It just randomly freezes. I haven't been able to have a single session in the last 4 months without it locking up atleast once. I normally have 5 players during my sessions but I even have freezes when its just me working on my campaign.

I've gotten my campaign to run at below 1GB memory usage I've tuned so much. The only clue I've ever gotten is while running process explorer to monitor FG. The process, as soon as it freezes, is at ~800MB - 1.5GB usually, but over the next few seconds of it being frozen, memory just gets crunched until theres nothing left. Usually takes it a min or 2 to eat all the memory. Eventually, when it hits max memory for 32-bit, it flounders around trying to figure itself and eventually crashes.

I just remembered running into an issue with Skype a few months back where I had to turn off MSI Afterburner or Skype would randomly crash. I also did a test last night and turned off MSI Afterburner, Steam, openhardware monitor, and any other rogue process I could find and I ran fine for hours. Course I won't know for sure till I have a gaming session this weekend.

[Pharo]

So no freezing the whole session. Around 5 hours. I think its safe to assume there is some kind of conflict between FG and one of the other pieces of software running in the background. Ill just have to test until I figure out which one.

[LordEntrails]

If you do figure it out, please let us know. Who knows if such might prove useful to someone else in the future.

[Pharo]

Definately will do. Im trying to avoid "speculating". Thats what lead me down multiple dead end rabbit holes. Doesn't FG have a coredump feature or something the developers could analyze? Maybe use Process Explorer to create a memory dump.

At this point it could be MSI Afterburner / RivaTunerStatisticsServer (most likely culprit), Open hardware monitor (unlikely but), Steam (overlays known to be difficult), or Logitech gaming sof

[Pharo]

I updated MSI Afterburner and RivaTuner and I can run those now at the same time, no freezing, even with everything else running. I still can't run Skype and Afterburners/Rivatuner at the same time without skype crashing constantly but the issues with FG seem to have gone away.