"Not Responding" with 'Fit Project' or 'Zoom Out' buttons

[mr-b]

Not Responding" for about 15s with lots of disk usage

This is CPU usage (the green icon in the System Tray if you use Windows Task Manager)?
Gale

Nope, it was the disk light that was on (and I could hear the drive thrashing away). The CPU wasn't at 100%.
It's very odd that there seems to be no reliable way of repeating it (except of course when I'm in a hurry with a project and have forgotten the exact steps I've taken)

[waxcylinder]

in trying to make a 1:02 project to test I took a 1 hour 45 minute recent recording at normal zoom level, positioned the cursor at 1:02 and tried selecting from cursor position to end. 5 to 6 minutes later I abandoned this as the selection was still not made (and thus the deletion of the unwanted audio could not be done). Similar experiment with 1.3.8 abandoned after 7 mins.

That's far worse than the problem we're discussing. Was the recent recording an unsaved project (temp data)? How were you selecting - with the mouse, by clicking and dragging the selection across the scroll? What was happening exactly? SHIFT + END should be instantaneous.

An unsaved project with temp files
Selecting by moving cursor to time location for start and clicking select and the skip-to-end button

Also tried in 1.3.8 opening the 1:45 project, zoom to fit project to screen, set cursor to 1:02 and selcted to end and pressed CTRL+K to delete the end section. It did it but it took over 4.5 minutes.

That's useless also. If it was a saved project that should be near instantaneous. Was Audacity "non-responding" while working on the deletion? I don't understand either of those two, except you were plain out of resources.

Plenty of resources, plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space recently de-fragged – no other applications running,

WC

[Gale Andrews]

in trying to make a 1:02 project to test I took a 1 hour 45 minute recent recording at normal zoom level, positioned the cursor at 1:02 and tried selecting from cursor position to end. 5 to 6 minutes later I abandoned this as the selection was still not made (and thus the deletion of the unwanted audio could not be done). Similar experiment with 1.3.8 abandoned after 7 mins.

That's far worse than the problem we're discussing. Was the recent recording an unsaved project (temp data)? How were you selecting - with the mouse, by clicking and dragging the selection across the scroll? What was happening exactly? SHIFT + END should be instantaneous.

An unsaved project with temp files
Selecting by moving cursor to time location for start and clicking select and the skip-to-end button

Just clicking the "Skip to End" button doesn't make a selection. Do you mean you held SHIFT and clicked that button? There is no point trying to replicate this until I'm clear about the steps you took.

Plenty of resources, plenty of RAM, plenty of disk space recently de-fragged – no other applications running,

I can't visualise it. Was the selection region inching across the screen? Or nothing was happening and then suddenly you got the requested selection after several minutes? Were you seeing "non-responding" in the Audacity Title Bar and Taskbar button? Had this project been idle for a long time?

It's very odd that there seems to be no reliable way of repeating it

I believe recording 90 minutes and then trying to fit the project would always show the hang?

It does seem fairly common on Windows that if you leave any program idle for a long time it will thrash the disc and be slow resuming when you go back and use it. I find that a lot on Win7 x64 (much more so than on XP) and I see other people get this too on Windows7. Of curse it could suggest memory leaks in the programs but that wouldn't appear to be an explanation on the face of it.


Thanks


Gale

[waxcylinder]

Just clicking the "Skip to End" button doesn't make a selection. Do you mean you held SHIFT and clicked that button? There is no point trying to replicate this until I'm clear about the steps you took.

Yes I do mean that I held Shift+”Skip to end” – sorry I wasn’t more accurate but I was in a serious RTC yesterday that wrote off my beloved motorbike and frankly I’m lucky I survived – so my thinking wasn’t too straight yesterday evening.

[waxcylinder]

I can't visualise it. Was the selection region inching across the screen? Or nothing was happening and then suddenly you got the requested selection after several minutes? Were you seeing "non-responding" in the Audacity Title Bar and Taskbar button? Had this project been idle for a long time?

Just tested the same project today:
Project length 1hr 44 mins.
Started Audacity and opened the saved project
Moved cursor to 1:02 with the selection start time in the selection toolbar
Pressed Play and then the Stop to move the display to show the 1:02 position
Scrolled to the left to move the 1:02 position fully on-screen
Clicked Shift+”Skip to end”
Timeline display is greyed to indicate selection – and the display moves to show the last 10 seconds of the project – but no audio selection takes place
WTM shows status as running and 2-4% CPU utilization and 50% memory utilization

I abandoned the test after 15 mins with no selection made.
Clicking near the end of the project in the display made the point cursor selection ok.

WC

[Gale Andrews]

First I tested recording 90 minutes in 1.3.13 in Ubuntu 10.04 then fitting the project; then exiting and restarting, recording 90 minutes and zooming out. Then I set that recording to View > Zoom Normal and saved as a project. I opened the project and zoomed out a few times. All these zooming/fitting actions produced a crisp response, and as their have been no complaints I know of on Mac, I must assume this "hang on zoom" problem is Windows only.

Just tested the same project today:
Project length 1hr 44 mins.
Started Audacity and opened the saved project
Moved cursor to 1:02 with the selection start time in the selection toolbar
Pressed Play and then the Stop to move the display to show the 1:02 position
Scrolled to the left to move the 1:02 position fully on-screen
Clicked Shift+”Skip to end”
Timeline display is greyed to indicate selection – and the display moves to show the last 10 seconds of the project – but no audio selection takes place
WTM shows status as running and 2-4% CPU utilization and 50% memory utilization

I abandoned the test after 15 mins with no selection made.
Clicking near the end of the project in the display made the point cursor selection ok.

I followed your steps above in 1.3.13 in Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 with the 90 minute long project saved above. SHIFT + "Skip to End" button moved instantaneously to the last 8 seconds or so of the track with the waveform correctly selected from 1h 02 m to the end.

Is the track selected when you SHIFT + Skip to End? You could easily deselect it If you clicked between the horizontal scrollbar and the track. If the track was not selected, the selection will never be made in the waveform until you reselect the track (clicking in the waveform would do that, or to select the track preserving the selection, hit ENTER).

If you are sure the track was selected when you hit SHIFT + Skip to End, then the problem clearly isn't a hang when zooming. Do you get the same problem if you hold SHIFT + click END?



Gale

[Storer]

[ Please Note: What follows is for techies only. Most of it will make sense only to computer-science majors or experienced systems programmers. I hope some of our developers fall into one of these categories. ]

I have a strong suspicion that the Windows "Not Responding" situations are caused by a huge number of page faults when processing large files. Seeing the disk light flashing when Audacity starts to crawl would be a symptom of this.

On XP, to see the number of page faults, start the Windows Task Manager (WTM). Then click on the Processes tab, then Menu->View->Select Columns. Check CPU Usage, every box labeled Memory ...., and also Page Faults and Page Faults Delta. The Page Faults is the total since starting Audacity, and the Delta is how many new page faults have occurred since the last screen update.

You can display the same columns with Windows 7, or you can click on the Performance tab of WTM, where there is a Resource Monitor button. Click that and then the Memory tab. This will give you a similar but better display of what's happening with memory.

The biq question of course is why does Windows cause so many page faults since we've gotten away from the 1.3.8 beta? Perhaps there is some algorithmic change to the way data is stored in memory?

When processing a large file on my old XP machine with 1 GB of memory, I noticed huge numbers of page faults when the "Commit" total shown on the WTM Performance tab got close to or beyond the actual physical main memory. I haven't done any experiments yet with my new Core i5-580 machine with 8Gb of memory. Now I'm interested to see what happens with large files. Stay tuned....

Dave

[Gale Andrews]

Thanks, Dave. I'm not one who falls into the "system programmers/CS majors" category, but I'm interested in what you may turn up here. Page faults are scarily named but are a necessary part of memory management. As I understand it, every time a process looks for addressed data in ram, if it's not there and has to be got from the hard drive, it's called a "Page Fault". For the Wikipedia article about what page faults are, click here.

My experience on further tests (just based on wait times, non-responding or otherwise), is that the hang on zoom problem is little if any worse in 1.3.12 than 1.3.8 (Win 7 and XP). But I'm one of those who does find both effects processing and the hang after processing completes (waiting for the new waveform to display) far slower in 1.3.12 than 1.3.8. What is your experience between 1.3.8 and 1.3.12 on the zooming hang and the effects processing problem? Have you done concrete side-by-side tests on similar projects in 1.3.8 and post-1.3.8 that show significantly more page faults after 1.3.8?

In 1.3.13 on Win 7, Audacity (about 30,000 page faults in 8 hours with a 90 minute file open most of that time) has the least faults of any process that is a complete application. My word processor (Atlantis) with three small rtf files open has 50,000 faults, Explorer has about 3 million and Google Chrome about 10 million (adding up all the separate processes it uses). I've never looked at this kind of data, but I will see what Ubuntu shows.



Gale

[waxcylinder]

Dave,

thanks for that mini-tutorail on WTM - I never realized you could see all that stuff by diddling with the view - most illuminating.

I am running it right now and one thing I notice immediately is thatI have one instantiation of audacity.exe running (1.3.13 Apha with Nikolay's patch). This audacity has been untouched and idle on my PC for several hours now - I did a timed recording overnight and saved the project this morning - having saved an empty project prior to the recording.
The Audacity.exe is showing 1,628, 757 "and rising" page faults - so what I don't understand is why the audacity page faults are relentlessly increasing at the rate of at least 10 or so a second - but while audacity is inactive and untouched ...

Any thoughs Gale?

WC

[waxcylinder]

I followed your steps above in 1.3.13 in Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 7 with the 90 minute long project saved above. SHIFT + "Skip to End" button moved instantaneously to the last 8 seconds or so of the track with the waveform correctly selected from 1h 02 m to the end.

Is the track selected when you SHIFT + Skip to End? You could easily deselect it If you clicked between the horizontal scrollbar and the track. If the track was not selected, the selection will never be made in the waveform until you reselect the track (clicking in the waveform would do that, or to select the track preserving the selection, hit ENTER).

If you are sure the track was selected when you hit SHIFT + Skip to End, then the problem clearly isn't a hang when zooming. Do you get the same problem if you hold SHIFT + click END?

Gale

No the audio track is definitely not selected - I have just repeated this test on the project I recorded last night 1:54 long this time went to the 1:02 position again and clicked SHIFT+Skip to End

As with you, the display moves instantaneously to the last 8 seconds or so of the project with the timeline marked as selected - but with the Audio definitely not selected.

It's already been in this state for seven minutes or so - but I will leave it running while I go and do a few chores and come back later to see if it does eventually select the audio as well as the timeline.

1.3.13 Alpha with Nikolay's patch

WC