Software on client unresponsive after pausing P3Dv5.2

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi John / Pete,

Running FSUIPC v6.1.5b and WideClient v7.156 with P3Dv5.2 HF1.

I setup a flight and started Radar Contact v4 on the client. Half-way to the departure runway I paused the sim for lunch.

When I returned I unpaused and continued to taxi. I had an RC instruction to contact Tower but when I pressed the button to acknowledge RC was unresponsive.

I then noticed the lua display on the client was showing the paused time, not the current despite me resetting it. It looks like comms between the two machines has been broken. I had to restart WideClient and the other programs including RC4 to get back to normality.

Any idea what could have caused this? Would a FSUIPC log help? The sim was paused for around 35 mins.

[John Dowson]

Hi Ray,

15 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Any idea what could have caused this?

Nope.

15 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Would a FSUIPC log help?

Probably not - the WideServer and/or WideClient.log may show something.

Is this repeatable or was it just a one off? if the latter, show us the log files, otherwise I wouldn't worry about it....

John

[Ray Proudfoot]

It happened yesterday when I paused the sim two thirds of the way to the destination. Same symptoms with RC4 very sluggish and not keeping up with my progress.

But after landing I checked Task Manager - Details and noticed couatl64 was hogging the CPU. That didn't happen today.

I'm inbound to Madrid and will post the log after landing.

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi John, here's the log. Can't see anything obvious. Can SimConnect get blocked up with data when in pause mode?

RayP3Dv5 Log.zip

[John Dowson]

The log from what? Did you experience the issue again then? And as I said, its the WideServer.log and WideClient.log files that are relevant if your issue is with Wide Client.

[Ray Proudfoot]

4 minutes ago, John Dowson said:

The log from what? Did you experience the issue again then? And as I said, its the WideServer.log and WideClient.log files that are relevant if your issue is with Wide Client.

I suppplied the FSUPC one earlier but here are the wideclient and wideserver logs from today's session. The wideclient is the one from the session I had to terminate due to a lack of comms between the two PCs. There are some disconnections on the server. Might that be the reason?

Ray_WideClient_Log.zip

[John Dowson]

2 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I suppplied the FSUPC one earlier but here are the wideclient and wideserver logs from today's session. The wideclient is the one from the session I had to terminate due to a lack of comms between the two PCs. There are some disconnections on the server. Might that be the reason?

So the logs are from different times?

Can you please confirm if this is a one off issue that happened yesterday, or is a repeatable issue that happens often or a lot.
If the former, I do not know why you are sending me log files. If the latter, I need to see the WideServer.log and WideClient.log BOTH from the session where you had your issues.

I am very busy at the moment and certainly won't have time to look into this for a few days (maybe next week), but I am just trying to determine if there is an actually issue to investigate. If this just happened once, yesterday, and seems ok now, I don't see any need to look into this.

John

[Ray Proudfoot]

No, the logs are for the same flight today. The wideclient log I attached was for the session from launching wideclient up to the point after I unpaused P3D and realised I couldn't talk to RC4. At that point I terminated wideclient and started it again. I haven't supplied that log as everything was okay.

The wideserver log was started when P3D started today. Nothing relates to any previous flights.

No hurry. But if you can spot anything that might explain why pausing the sim for 40 mins would cause the connection between wideserver and wideclient to 'break' I'd appreciate it.

I had a similar problem yesterday but haven't supplied any logs for that.

[John Dowson]

What is the client PC on which you are running RC4 - is it DELL-XPS15 or FSSUPPORT?

Your WideClient.log doesn't show any disconnects or issues, but the WideServer log shows a few reconnections.

Did you try just restarting RC4, to see if the issue is there? Maybe try that next time, before restarting WideClient.

Otherwise @Pete Dowson may know more - he is still in charge of WideClient.

John

[Ray Proudfoot]

John, RC4 was running on FSSUPPORT. DELL-XPS15 was running a program showing Ai aircraft in P3D. Very light use of wideclient.

I didn’t try restarting RC4 because I could see the data in a lua file displayed on FSSUPPORT was also not updating. That shows current Zulu and local time so I knew the problem wasn’t just limited to RC4 as the time displayed differed to that in the sim.

[John Dowson]

2 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

RC4 was running on FSSUPPORT

Ok, then these are the relevant WideServer log entries:

Quote

  ...
   199875 Connected to computer "FSSUPPORT" running WideClient version 7.156 (skt=21168) TCP
   ...
  4473516 Error 10053: client socket disconnected at Client: removing (skt=21168) TCP
  4502157 Incoming connection Accepted ok (skt=2648) TCP
  4502453 Connected to computer "FSSUPPORT" running WideClient version 7.156 (skt=2648) TCP
  9230063 Error 10054: client socket disconnected at Client: removing (skt=2648) TCP
 

The line in bold shows the disconnection, but I suspect that is from when you closed WideClient and then restarted around 29seconds later.
 

Lets see what Pete has to say...

John

[Ray Proudfoot]

John, I’ll run a test tomorrow with P3D running and just wideclient on the FSSUPPORT machine. That will be running the lua script and nothing else.

Pausing P3D for a few minutes and observing what happens when it’s unpaused may reveal something.

This is something relatively new. I’ve had this version of RC4 for 15 years and never encountered this problem with previous versions of flight sim. v4, v3, FSX et al.

[Pete Dowson]

4 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

This is something relatively new. I’ve had this version of RC4 for 15 years and never encountered this problem with previous versions of flight sim. v4, v3, FSX et al.

So you recently update FSUIPC and / or WideClient? Nothing else? Same P3D5 build for how long? Presumably something must have changed?

I've seen some reports of odd things happening when P3D5 is paused for a longish time. I suspect something is causing either WideClient or WideServer to timeout. I thought from reading those other reports of anomalies with long pauses that P3D or on of the usual addons is taking too many CPU cycles.

As you know, I'm very dependent on WideFS working well and continuously on my cockpit, but since 5.2HF2 I've had some weird things happen on long pauses -- just seemingly not specifically in WideFS in my case.

I'm reserving judgement on this until I've installed and tested P3D5.3 on my cockpit PC (up till now I've only had it on my development PC to check that FSUIPC compatibility is maintained). Maybe you could do the same if you can't identify what has changed on your system.

BTW one of the very interesting things in 5.3 is a facility to assign different CPU cores to different aspects of P3D activity.

Pete

 

[Ray Proudfoot]

Hi Pete,

Nice to hear from you. 🙂 Nothing else updated for quite some time. I did update the BIOS today - first time since getting the PC 3 years ago.

The only update to FSUIPC was a little addition John did for me for Day Number of Zulu date a couple of months ago. No change to WideClient.

I’m going to test a pause tomorrow with just the lua file running and nothing else and if the time I display on it doesn’t update after a pause that may offer a clue. Maybe enhanced logging might help.

I see v5.3 is out so will update in a couple of days. Assigning cores looks interesting and could improve fps.

[Pete Dowson]

10 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Nothing else updated for quite some time. I did update the BIOS today - first time since getting the PC 3 years ago.

The only update to FSUIPC was a little addition John did for me for Day Number of Zulu date a couple of months ago. No change to WideClient.

... but you've not seen a Pause problem with WideFS before? Surely something else has changed, or haven't you paused for longish periods before? Nothing is WideClient or the WideServer part in FSUIPC has been changed for a very long time -- especially the Network side of things.

Is WideClient hanging or crashing? did you check the Event Viewer on the client to see? If it is still running (such that you can close it normally) then it will be continually attempting to reconnect.

I see you have two Clients (according to the Server log). Do they both hang or stop at the same time? If only on the one client (with RC) has anything changed recently on that PC?

17 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

That shows current Zulu and local time so I knew the problem wasn’t just limited to RC4 as the time displayed differed to that in the sim.

My little Lua FPS display displays FS time, which isn't changing whilst the Sim is paused in any case. But I can see by the slightly varying frame rate that the connection is still live. That and the also slightly changing WideClient frames per second showing the the WideClient title bar.

Pete

 

[Ray Proudfoot]

16 minutes ago, Pete Dowson said:

... but you've not seen a Pause problem with WideFS before? Surely something else has changed, or haven't you paused for longish periods before? Nothing is WideClient or the WideServer part in FSUIPC has been changed for a very long time -- especially the Network side of things.

I don't pause every flight. Only those that are close to 1pm when I break for lunch. Some might be when taxiing out, others when airborne. I don't suspect WideServer / WideClient. I think they're victims of something else. I've now located my PMDG737 to Milan and have paused it. I'm monitoring the lua file on FSSUPPORT and fps is being updated so things are currently fine.

WideClient has never crashed on me. I suspect it's something perhaps using SimConnect that is flooding the link and causing problems with software using WideClient / WideServer.

I do run AIG TC which uses SimConnect. That's not running for this test.

I run AI Companion on DELL-XPS15 but didn't pay too much attention to that as I was concentrating on getting RC4 working.

One thing I did notice on the flight two days ago when descending to LEAL and RC4 wasn't keeping up with me was couatl64 was showing very high usage in Task Manager. I suspect that was the cause of that problem but unsure why it would be behaving that way.

I'll setup another flight with RC4 running and then pause P3D. If the problem can be replicated I'll check Task Manager for any high usage of other executables. That may provide the answer.

[Ray Proudfoot]

Pete / John,

I've just setup the same flight as yesterday. LFBO-LEMD. I've paused the sim taxiing out to 32R. If the same happens as yesterday then I'm forewarned and can check logs and other executables in Task Manager for any unusual behaviour.

More to follow...

[Ray Proudfoot]

Interesting. I paused P3D for 40 mins and then unpaused it. RC was responsive and when I adjusted the time the lua display was updated immediately.

There was one difference from yesterday. Ai Companion was not running on the DELL-XPS15 laptop via WideClient.

I've now started it and will pause P3D for 30 mins minimum. AIC does interact via SimConnect as well as FSUIPC so I wonder if that might be a factor. I don't use its facility to delete any Ai Aircraft. Purely as a visual indicator of Ai in P3D.

[Ray Proudfoot]

After a further 30 min pause I unpaused. I was taxiing to 32R and shortly afterwards was told to contact Twr. Did that and all was well. Updated sim time and that was reflected in lua display.

AIC is now running and I'm now enroute to LEMD. I'll pause for another 25 mins. More to follow.

[Ray Proudfoot]

I paused P3D for 45 mins and when I unpaused it RC4 was fine. But look at my CPU core usage. I'm at FL390 over northern Spain near Pamplona. No way should core 0 be running flat out like that. Although WideFS seems fine at present I wonder if this pausing is responsible for the heavy use of the cores.

Just spotted something. There are 12 cores. That means hyperthreading has been turned back on. Probably as a result of yesterday's BIOS update. I'll turn it off after this flight and see how things go with further ones.

It's not a WideFS problem so this is for info only.

 

[John Dowson]

Hi Ray,

If you continue to get issues, you could maybe try setting the ReconnectMinutes WideClient ini parameter:

Quote

ReconnectMinutes=0: This parameter can be used to tell WideClient to automatically re-make its connection with the Server at
intervals. The value 0 turns this off. Some users find that after continual use for hours the Networking in the client seems to slow
down or even give “Bad Data” errors in Clients. There’s no errors actually signaled by Wndows to WideClient and I suspect the
problems are down to driver or hardware problems, but the client applications seems to suffer without WideClient being aware of
this.
If this happens, and it has only been reported when doing flights for four hours or more, try setting a value here – e.g. 240 for
reconnection every four hours.
The reconnection is almost immediate and may not even be noticed. It will of course be logged at both ends.
 

 

[Ray Proudfoot]

Thanks John. I've now turned off Hyperthreading. The flight earlier was very stuttery presumably because there was no Affinity Mask setting in P3d config so the program was trying to push as much as possible onto core 0.

Now corrected and should I get any further problems with WideFS connection I'll try the above, thanks.