Sandbox looks frozen (but still responsive)

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  • #2574
    R. Kreutel
    Participant

    This troubles me for quite some time now. For reasons I cannot find there are times when the image just stops. Moving the mouse around at least makes the water ripple, height lines remain frozen.
    But the Box Software ist still responding, as is the computer. I can exit the sandbox window gracefully and restart the application. My restart script finds and kills all sandbox processes and resets the kinect communication via usbreset.
    Sometimes it “freezes” after minutes again, sometimes after 2 hours, sometimes never.
    Monitoring resources shows: It lacks neither RAM nor storage. One of 8 cores is really working, but that must be expected (or does it not?).

    Does anyone have an idea how to diagnose or even fix that?
    Thanks a lot
    Ralf from Berlin

    #2575
    Sean Robinson
    Participant

    A little more information might help. What Linux distribution and version are you using? Which model GPU? Which GPU driver?

    The following are ideas and questions that I might pursue, if it were my sandbox.

    How much of the sandbox software is responsive during a freeze? Can you bring up menus?

    What other programs freeze? Try the Vrui example ShowEarthModel app and leave the earth rotating, does the animation freeze? Does glxgears freeze?

    If glxgears does not freeze on its own, run glxgears and SARndbox at the same time. Does glxgears freeze when the sandbox freezes?

    Much of the above is to determine if the freeze is in the GPU or CPU.

    I would try re-seating RAM and the video card in their motherboard slots. I’ve seen loose video cards cause intermittent hard freezes (i.e. only rebooting will restore the system).

    #2576
    R. Kreutel
    Participant

    Thanks for pointing me somewhere. As it is:
    We do have a Xeon E5 1630, 32GB RAM and a GTX1070 (8GB) running Linux Mint 20.3 with the proprietary Nvidia-Driver (v470?).

    I just ran the EarthModel as well as the glxgears, both revolving happily over the still image from the Sandbox. And everything else is perfectly responsive, I can stop and run both at leisure, open terminals, use a browser – you name it. The Sandbox Menus do open as well.

    Next step will be to re-seat RAM and video card, though I do not expect to learn anything from that.

    What I noticed is that the system report of Mint shows incidents, though I do not get any additional information there (“no package found”).
    Maybe there is a debug mode within the box?

    And I will disable my modifications to the code and see if that changes anything. Basically, I added a permanent water level and two more options for the control pipe (flooding/draining), because I control the box from a tablet with a web interface via shell scripts executed by a local web server.

    Just wanted to look active, I will get back here when the testing will have gone a little further.

    Thanks again

    • This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by R. Kreutel. Reason: "32GM" -> "32GB"
    #2578
    Sean Robinson
    Participant

    What does it look like (on the sand) if you reshape the sand after a freeze? Do the contour lines remain frozen? Does the water flow through the new terrain or keep animating in the frozen terrain?

    Can you swap out the Kinect? Are there any infrared light sources (like a covered, exterior window) that could influence the Kinect?

    I’m curious what you mean by “permanent water level”. I’ve customized our sandbox, too, and I’m interested in what others have done. My own changes have mostly been to convert command line arguments (i.e. -evr and -rs) to pipe commands.

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