BigBox memory leak in 12.9/12.10?

[superrob3000]

I've noticed a pretty bad memory leak in 12.9 and 12.10, although it may have started earlier. See attached pic where BigBox has crept up to 13GB of RAM usage after about a day and a half. Note that on the main Task Manager Processes page it won't look like BigBox is using much memory because private memory usage stays steady at a couple of Gigs. You have to go to the details tab to see that shared memory for BigBox slowly increases until all of your memory is used up. BigBox will eventually give an error message that it is out of memory and close.

For testing this was sitting in attract mode for a day and a half with no plugins, using the default theme, and marquee disabled.

[JaysArcade]

I run 2 scheduled tasks every day. The first task kills any Launchbox/Bigbox executables. The second task opens Bigbox 5 minutes after closing it. If I don't do this, Bigbox will eventually freeze up after a day or so. It's always been like this for me. I have the schedule set to run during a time I'm not around so I don't even notice it. This is the only way I've ever been able to just leave my arcade running all the time without manually fiddling around with it everyday restarting Bigbox.

[superrob3000]

FYI, this particular issues turned out to be a slow memory leak in VLC. Switching to WMP fixed it. VLC also has a known bug that can cause random crashes.

[rotatorkuf]

On 7/13/2022 at 5:43 PM, JaysArcade said:

I run 2 scheduled tasks every day. The first task kills any Launchbox/Bigbox executables. The second task opens Bigbox 5 minutes after closing it. If I don't do this, Bigbox will eventually freeze up after a day or so. It's always been like this for me. I have the schedule set to run during a time I'm not around so I don't even notice it. This is the only way I've ever been able to just leave my arcade running all the time without manually fiddling around with it everyday restarting Bigbox.

i have the same issue, why isn't this more well documented, like what are people doing that they're not encountering this!

but, what time do you run these, what if you're in the middle of playing a game?

Edited July 16, 2022 by rotatorkuf

[JaysArcade]

Pretty sure that most people don't let their bigbox run constantly, so they're probably not seeing it.

Time of the day? Do you sleep? I could be wrong but I bet there's a good chance there is a time of the day you never play games. I run my scheduled tasks around 9 am. I'm usually not home at that time of the day and if I am I'm probably sleeping in, not playing games. Plus this time of day guarantees that Bigbox was started earlier that day so its probably not about ready to crash from being open too long.

Also, try superrob's advice above about switching to wmp. I still saw random crashes with wmp but not nearly as often. Still though - running a scheduled kill and startup has fixed my issues of walking into my garage to a frozen, unresponsive Bigbox on my arcade cabinet.

[rotatorkuf]

33 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:

Pretty sure that most people don't let their bigbox run constantly, so they're probably not seeing it.

Time of the day? Do you sleep? I could be wrong but I bet there's a good chance there is a time of the day you never play games. I run my scheduled tasks around 9 am. I'm usually not home at that time of the day and if I am I'm probably sleeping in, not playing games. Plus this time of day guarantees that Bigbox was started earlier that day so its probably not about ready to crash from being open too long.

Also, try superrob's advice above about switching to wmp. I still saw random crashes with wmp but not nearly as often. Still though - running a scheduled kill and startup has fixed my issues of walking into my garage to a frozen, unresponsive Bigbox on my arcade cabinet.

when you say scheduled task, are you using something like autohotkey? or some kind of scripting app, i don't see an option to kill a program in windows task scheduler

[JaysArcade]

Oh, yeah. I guess I should have mentioned that. It's an autohotkey script/exe.

If you want to compile it yourself, here is the code.

Run it at your own risk. Someone here might say its not the correct way to close Bigbox, but I've had it on this system since well before the pandemic started and I've had zero issues. 🤷‍♂️
 

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
 
KillProcessTimer:
  Process, Close, BigBox.exe
  SetTimer, KillProcessTimer, -10000
  return

Exitapp

 

I guess I lied. I have it set for 8 am not 9 am.

Kill. Not sure why I set it for Windows vista but it works. I might have just been experimenting.

Start. This one is set for windows 10.

Edited July 16, 2022 by JaysArcade
spelling

[rotatorkuf]

36 minutes ago, JaysArcade said:

Oh, yeah. I guess I should have mentioned that. It's an autohotkey script/exe.

If you want to compile it yourself, here is the code.

Run it at your own risk. Someone here might say its not the correct way to close Bigbox, but I've had it on this system since well before the pandemic started and I've had zero issues. 🤷‍♂️
 

SetTitleMatchMode, 2
 
KillProcessTimer:
  Process, Close, BigBox.exe
  SetTimer, KillProcessTimer, -10000
  return

Exitapp

 

I guess I lied. I have it set for 8 am not 9 am.

Kill. Not sure why I set it for Windows vista but it works. I might have just been experimenting.

Start. This one is set for windows 10.

awesome, thanks

sad we have to do this lol

[rotatorkuf]

On 7/13/2022 at 7:23 PM, superrob3000 said:

FYI, this particular issues turned out to be a slow memory leak in VLC. Switching to WMP fixed it. VLC also has a known bug that can cause random crashes.

funny enough this is happening to me with WMP, going to try vlc

[curtis-r]

Had been having no issues with LB/BB since getting up and running a few months ago on my cabinet build (after years of using Hyperspin).  I have it sleep when not in use.  A week ago I changed the monitor, and used the opportunity to upgrade the RAM from 4GB DDR3 to 8GB.  But after a couple of hours of attract mode, I now I having Windows warning of memory limit reached (Win7x64) due to BB shutting down.  Obviously I could try my 4GB of RAM again, but that makes no sense.  I can't say it has anything to do with the RAM upgrade, but I can't think of anything else that has really changed.

[faeran]

10 hours ago, curtis-r said:

Had been having no issues with LB/BB since getting up and running a few months ago on my cabinet build (after years of using Hyperspin).  I have it sleep when not in use.  A week ago I changed the monitor, and used the opportunity to upgrade the RAM from 4GB DDR3 to 8GB.  But after a couple of hours of attract mode, I now I having Windows warning of memory limit reached (Win7x64) due to BB shutting down.  Obviously I could try my 4GB of RAM again, but that makes no sense.  I can't say it has anything to do with the RAM upgrade, but I can't think of anything else that has really changed.

I'm assuming you are not on the version of LaunchBox this post is referring to. What version are you running?

[curtis-r]

Sorry, my bad.  On 12.14.

[faeran]

42 minutes ago, curtis-r said:

Sorry, my bad.  On 12.14.

So you are on one of the betas it sounds like. There should be another beta release either today or tomorrow. When it's out, upgrade to that and let us know in the main beta thread if it helps with your setup.

[curtis-r]

Again my bad.  I'm on 12.13.  Considering it was a formal release, I'm skeptical it's a bug, otherwise they're be a lot more noise.  I'll try to run one of my backup folders and see if the issue persists.

[curtis-r]

Through various trial & error, it appears the Retrotastic theme is the issue.  No problems using the default LB Theme.   I should mention I modified the main menu background png in Retrotastic, but the size is essentially the same as the original, so I'd be surprised if I caused this.  Guess I should revert back the image & run another test with Retrotastic.

[faeran]

1 hour ago, curtis-r said:

Through various trial & error, it appears the Retrotastic theme is the issue.  No problems using the default LB Theme.   I should mention I modified the main menu background png in Retrotastic, but the size is essentially the same as the original, so I'd be surprised if I caused this.  Guess I should revert back the image & run another test with Retrotastic.

That theme is definitely image heavy, so definitely expect a larger footprint. In saying that, it could probably use a new publish from the CTC, so it can take advantage of the new plugin. You could do this yourself if you download the CTC and the CTC files for RetroArch. It sounds like you made some manual changes to the theme, so you would want to make sure you back them up before you do so.

[curtis-r]

I spoke too soon.  After much of the day using Default theme, I received the memory warning & LB was basically frozen.  This had not happened in the past and with only 4GB, and now I have 8GB.  I will say I had my monitor vertical & thus used a vertical theme.  Maybe that theme was much less demanding.  Probably unfair comparison, but also never had issues with years of Hyperspin @ 4GB.

[C-Beats]

4GB of ram in 2022 is unrealistically low to ever have in a machine. You can easily have more than 4GB in art assets displayed at one time in a theme depending on the size of your artwork or what method the dev used to display the images. 16GB is the recommended amount of machines running Windows 10 or newer. 8GB WILL work, but you will definitely feel the machine come to a crawl when performing certain tasks (or trying to multitask too many applications)