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[hoyt]

I installed MC27 on an older RPi3 I had laying around last year.  At some point recently I upgraded to MC28 hoping that would address this issue.  I don't play too much to it, but when I do, it rarely seems to go for more than 2 hours before some form of lockup.  When this happens, the GUI in the VNC screen is frozen.  I kick off htop, find the MC28 process, kill it, and reopen.  I often see that the memory consumption is huge, like 80% of the 1GB in the RPi3.  MC is running as a client on the RPi, getting the data from a Win10 server.

Is there something in particular I should look at in my logs that would be helpful?  I have a RPi-Id in another room that runs on a Pi3 pretty consistently 24/7, so my expectation was that I could leave this thing on all the time.  Thanks!

[mwillems]

One issue I ran into that may be your issue:  if you have "auto-sync with server" enabled under the client options on the pi, try running with that option disabled instead.  On my Linux systems when I leave that option checked it leads to gradually increasing memory consumption (until everything freezes or crashes).  I've had the issue on and off for years, and bob and Hendrik even spent some time trying to run it down with me, but they couldn't repro it, and not everybody sees it.

In any case, it's worth a try in case that's your issue.  If the auto sync setting turns out to be your issue, but the Id pi doesn't have the issue with the same option checked, that would be pretty interesting.

[hoyt]

Thanks - that option was checked.  I shut it off and restarted MC, we'll see what happens over the next few days. 

Of course, I posted about this and will be away from my desk for a day, so I won't know until Thursday/ Friday.  It is worth clarifying in my case the system itself isn't frozen, it's simply the MC GUI.  I can still VNC to the desktop when this is happening. 

[hoyt]

After some time today, I do not think this made a difference.  I played an album through this morning.  Then started it over again this afternoon.  It got through 2 or 3 tracks, then froze.  I look now in htop and MC is using 70% memory.

Just realized I was running MC27 instead of MC28 (where I actually changed the pref).  Will redo this testing.

[hoyt]

It seems like this may have made it better, but I'm still getting lock ups.  Just now it happened, I looked in htop and MC28 was taking only 19% of memory, but the GUI was unresponsive so I had to kill the task and relaunch the app.

[JimH]

I had problems like that with an RPi a few years ago.  It turned out to be caused by an inadequate power supply.

You could do a Google search for RPi power problems.  The bottom line is that you can't reliably plug peripherals (USB drive, etc.) into the USB ports on the Pi.

VNC is also possibly related.  Try testing without it.

[erviv]

I also had frequent issues with drop outs. What improved it the most for me was switching out my SD card for a better quality one.

[hoyt]

Thanks, I'll look into both of these things.  I thought I had a good quality Canakit power supply on this one, but just crawled around my desk and think I left that in another room when I moved this originally.  This appears to be a 'standard' phone one, I should have thought to check that.

I'll double check the SD Card, but I think it's a sandisk ultra 98 mb/s one, which should be fairly high quality.  If you have one you recommend, I'm all ears. 

[erviv]

There are many good SD cards.  SD cards can also start to fail for a variety of reasons, I suspect age is a factor.  I was using Kingston SD cards which are good, however when I ran RPi Diagnostics it showed that it was having some issues and was not passing the read/write tests.  I switched to a Silicon Power (SP) SD card and ran RPi Diagnostics and it passed with flying colours. I suggest you run the Raspberry Pi Diagnostics which is in the accessories of raspbian O/S desktop.  It will tell you whether your read/write speed on your SD card is adequate.  If it passes your card is fine. If it doesn't it is worthwhile replacing.

Here is the output from my Rpi. with the SP SD Card.

Raspberry Pi Diagnostics - version 0.9
Fri Sep 17 19:30:17 2021

Test : SD Card Speed Test
Run 1
prepare-file;0;0;21333;41
seq-write;0;0;21368;41
rand-4k-write;0;0;4805;1201
rand-4k-read;11352;2838;0;0
Sequential write speed 21368 KB/sec (target 10000) - PASS
Random write speed 1201 IOPS (target 500) - PASS
Random read speed 2838 IOPS (target 1500) - PASS
Test PASS

[hoyt]

I tested the SD card and it passed, and I replaced the power supply with a new one from Canakit.  However, today I had the same issue again. 

Just playing a 16bit/44.1 album too, so not even pushing large files.  I played most of one album, and at the end of the second to last track, the output just stopped.  Then it didn't advance to the next track.  I open up VNC (it was not running at the time, I just connected to it to see what was happening), and the MC GUI is frozen.  After waiting about a minute or two, I see the zone disappear from my server's Playing Now list.  I kill MC on the RPi, and relaunch it, then I refresh dynamic entries on my server, the RPi shows back up and I double click the last track to start it. 

[hoyt]

For what it's worth, I gave up.  I've installed mpd and upmpdcli to setup the pi as a dlna renderer only (which is what I want in this situation).  It seems to be working just fine for my purposes.  I've gone through a few 24/96 albums and a few 16/44.1 albums without issue.