3.x Vixen 3 on Windows 10

adski

Dave Brown
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Jon Chuchla posted this on diyc yesterday:

We've gotten several reports within the past few weeks regarding Vixen 3 performance on windows 10. The problems are manifesting in the actual output chain as well as extremely slow exports with the export function.

While our initial testing on windows 10 was very positive, it appears that something has changed between the prerelease test versions of win 10 we were using and the version that is currently available. So we are temporarily removing windows 10 from the supported OS list until we get it sorted out.

The problems seem to be something within the .net 4.6 framework. Vixen 3.2 targets the 4.5.2 .net framework. However windows 10 ships with 4.6 and it appears that 4.5.2 cannot be installed on win 10. Unfortunately there's some changes in 4.6 that breaks our debugging tools so we're struggling to determine the root cause of the problem. So for the time being, we recommend against windows 10 for vixen 3.2.

A Google search reveals similar problems in other programs - MS seem to have botched memory management and/or garbage collection in .NET 4.6

In practice, the issue is worse with more complicated displays and sequences, so it may not occur in simpler set ups.

Dave
 

AussiePhil

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I have done a number of exports from Vix3 under Win10 both small and large, large was no worse than win8 but small felt immensely quicker, so not sure what's going on..

Whilst it's all fine to recommend against Win10 it becomes hard if you buying a brand new machine that only comes with Win10.
 

adski

Dave Brown
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It's a quandary, Phil - different people get different results on Win 10, which makes it tricky to pin down the root cause. However, there's progress - Jeff Uchitjil is chasing it down on a Win 10 VM and has discovered significant pausing when the .NET garbage collector is busy recovering memory - it's apparently a lot more agressive in 4.6 than it was in 4.5.2

Jeff has a work-around test build that may be worth trying for anyone having performance issues since upgrading to Win 10.

Dave
 

scamper

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Don't know about windows 10 but I am using windows 8 and I have a problem where whenever I attempt to go into the setup display menu, the program shuts down!
I am going to do a complete uninstall and reinstall to see if it fixes it, but it is frustrating.
I won't be upgrading to windows 10 for my show computer that is for sure.
 

jchuchla

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Sorry guys. I always forget to post over here. Thanks Dave for cross posting for us.

This issue is a tricky one to nail down because the profiling tools we're using doesn't handle .net 4.6 yet. MS built some new tools into the newer visual studio but we haven't moved vixen to that platform yet and that has its own set of issues to overcome. It's a big project so it's hard to maintain stability when upgrading toolchains.
Anyhow. It seems like there's a combination of things going on. It seems that .net 46 isn't allocating as much memory to vixen. And then the garbage collection is also more aggressive with longer pauses.
I was doing the early win10 testing for vixen. Things were looking good at that point but that was with a prerelease version of win10. It looks like something changed on final release. The timing of the releases didn't help either. Vixen 3.2 and win 10 came out one day after the other. So what we thought was working turned out to not be the case in the end.
Right now we're considering this a temporary situation. We will get this fixed and sorted out. We agree that win 10 is inevitable and we need to support it. But at the same time we want to be transparent and let everyone know what we're dealing with. People who need a guaranteed good show can still take measures to run on an OS that we know works.
 

jchuchla

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scamper said:
Don't know about windows 10 but I am using windows 8 and I have a problem where whenever I attempt to go into the setup display menu, the program shuts down!
I am going to do a complete uninstall and reinstall to see if it fixes it, but it is frustrating.
I won't be upgrading to windows 10 for my show computer that is for sure.
This problem is a known bug in 3.2 it should have been fixed in 3.2u1. However a uninstall or simply deleting the vixen folder in program files before reinstalling will fix the problem.
The problem was that here was still an old unused file in the folder that didn't get deleted on upgrade.
 

jchuchla

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UPDATE: Vixen appears to now work Windows 10.

It appears that Microsoft may have identified and corrected the issues that have been causing the Vixen issues on .net Framework 4.6 on Windows 10. This fix was included in the September 30 mandatory Cumulative Update. (CU 7 KB3093266).

This fix is also available for other versions of windows with the .NET Framework 4.6, but the update process may be different.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3093266 - Window 10
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3088956 - Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3088955 - Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3088957 - Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, and Windows Vista SP2

After installing the hotfix, the mscorlib.dll version should be 4.6.106.0.

As you probably know, these updates are mandatory for most users of Windows 10. It's my understanding that it will install automatically whether you like it or not. It's not clear to me of the timing, but I'd assume that it can take a few days from the release date for it to download and install to your machine.

We've retested Vixen 3.2u1 against windows 10 with this update and the performance appears to be back to what we see on .net 4.5.2 (maybe even better). In the interest of full disclosure, none of the Vixen Core Development actually uses windows 10 on a real computer. (we're just too cautious for that) We do all our Win 10 testing on virtual machines set up just for this purpose. so it's not quite a real world test. That being said however, we did in fact see the problems before the update, and they seem to be gone after the update.

So, we are cautiously pulling back on the warnings. If you have a windows 10 computer on which you want to use vixen, please check that your windows updates are current, and give it a try. We are interested in hearing your experience whether good or bad.
 

BradsXmasLights

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FYI I also had the terrible export performance issues too with my Windows 7 machine, which also had 4.6 .net on it. Similar sequence/config as year, apart from latest devbuild versions & some trivial sequence adjustments for this year.


Upon installing the 4.6 hotfix it came good too. 1:20min sequence was taking hours; now it did it whilst typing this post. :D
 
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