BigBox memory issue on computers with 4GB ram

[Jason Carr]

23 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:

For the last year or so, I've used a scheduled task to kill Bigbox every morning at 9:00 am and another to restart Bigbox at 9:05am for the same reasons. After running for a few hours, Bigbox becomes sluggish and/or unresponsive and I've occasionally got the out of memory error. Not sure how much memory I have but pretty sure it's 8 gigs. If not, I'll upgrade. I'll check next time I'm on my cab to see what I have in there.

Its disheartening to see BigBox crashed every day when I come home. Using the task scheduler has really improved things for me. FWIW, the latest releases - 9.4 and 9.5 have seemed to be a lot more stable - at least the menu controls seem to be more responsive after an extended period of not touching the system. Previously, I could walk up to my cab and press buttons, or try to navigate, and the the attract mode would just keep spinning like I wasn't even there.

This thread really has me curious. I will definitely look to see how much RAM I have this weekend when I have time.

We discovered before the 9.4 release that some themes/plugins for Big Box were causing these stability issues. Most of the affected themes and plugins have either been fixed or disabled in the 9.4/9.5 releases. However, it's important to note that plugins (even when installed by themes) can cause major stability issues, so it's important to test things with the default themes if you're running into issues, as most likely it's theme and plugin-related.

Going forward, we'll be testing themes for stability before they get uploaded to the new built-in themes manager and downloader in Big Box, and all themes will be approved. Themes that cause crashes, assuming we catch them, will not be allowed in the automatic downloader (though they'll still be available on the forums with warnings).

8 gigs of RAM is generally enough, but some themes are intensive and some plugins weren't properly cleaning themselves up, so the limit can be hit. In most cases 8 gigs will be enough, but you might benefit from 12 or 16 for some of the more intensive themes.

If you're still running into any slowdowns or crashes at all in 9.5, please try using either the Default theme or the CriticalZone V2 - Default theme and let me know if that fixes it (and what theme you run regularly).