Hangs and crashes

General Feedback & Requests
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1

This may not relate to UnrealEditor per se, but I have thus issue with larger levels, in multiple versions of the program.

I encountered the problem with a big level in a project I have worked on several weeks ago. Opening it always took time, and in 5.7 I always got that memory warning popping up, freezing other apps for seconds multiple times, but it always loaded completely and I could well work on it, eben play in editor, though with warnings and messages and hickups.

Until a few days ago.

Opening that level took at least an hour, but it froze the whole system when at 85% of compiling shaders. Completely. The system enenrually restarted itself, without intervention.

In a second attempt, the system froze completely again, when compiling the shaders was at 45%..

After restarting the system by hand, I tried another level, same size but without additions I made it in the first opened level, it made it to 65% and the system froze.

Tried that level in the original project, under 5.3: same issue.

Another project, smaller, and using world partitions, in 5.6, loaded the one region that I closed it on, but it took more than 30 minutes, at least twice as much timeas before. But when trying to play in the editor (plsy from here) the system hung again, and finally restarted itself.

Of course I checked usage of memory, disk acess and CPU and GPU use, my suspicion is that the system is paging heavily, and in the end, is just thrashing.

I have two internal HDD with a 512Gb pagefile each, and in the end, one if them is 100% busy, the other one between 30% and 80%, with relatively low average CPU usage. When the system freezes, these measurements freeze as well. Even mouse and keyboard are ‘dead’.

In these few weeks, the only changes to the system are the usual Windows updates and updates of the Nvidia Studio driver.

I had my system BIOS set to XMP1 over clocking, all on auto, switched that off but that made no difference.

My system has Intel 13900F CPU, 64 Gb of RAM, Nvidia 4090 graphic card and runs Windows 11 Pro

Any idea and hint to get these projects working again is appreciated

2

I sympathize…

The one biggest change you can make, is moving over to SSD rather than HDD.

I know that’s expensive at the moment though.

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I don’t think it is a matter of HDD or SSD, because it ran perfectly with the pagefiles on HDD before. The win in speed is not relevant for me - and pagefiles, with their heavy write activity, on SSD that have far lower limits on the number of wtites than a HDD, is, AFAIK, ‘not recommended’.

Besides that - two things.

First, it seems that asset collection and/or shader compilation is done by CPU, not GPU because I found 100% CPU usage on the load. GPU load stays relatively low…(< 30%). Is that normal?
Second, I noted that the newest NVidia Studio software has the ability to extend the shader memory on the card using system memory. Default that seems to be set to 5Gb on the card and extend to system memory if fully occupied. Maybe disabling that could solve the issue…

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First, I checked the NVidia settings but it didn’t make a differenence.

Next, I copied one of these projects to another machine, where is did load completely - though it took a long time and it wasn’t looking good - missing height info??? - but at least, it didn’t hang or crash.

Since I noted that one of the disks that had one of the pagefiles was 100% occupied, I looked there and noted a SearchIndex file. So I looked into the Search settings and behold - that disk was indeed used as storage unit for search (automatically???) and there was no filter on what to search, nor locations! So it’s likely that this disk gets overloaded - hence 100% - and therefore, Unreal isn’t able to page memory, in or out.
Now first, I removed both pagefiles and placed one (temporary) on an almost empty SSD disk - to see if that helped. And yes, now the level does load completely.

Now I’m changing the location of the search index to another disk (too small to hold a 512Gb pagefile) and limit the number of extensions to the only ones that really matter to me. That would make that other disk busy for 100% but since that will normally not be accessed, it doesn’t interfere at all. Now I can return to my original setting: two 512Gb pagefiles on two separate disks.

See if that works. Slower perhaps but that doesn’t bother me.

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5

Sounds better :slight_smile:

6

Disabled indexing completely.

One of the two disks seems to be less reactive than the other, removed the page file from that disk, made room on the other one, in case a 512Gb page file is too small.

On test I found that the project is damaged severely, but luckily a had made a backup, just in case :rofl: but it takes time to copy that one back…

update:

I noted that on Settings/System/About the system doesn’t recognizes no storage:

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wich is ridiculous because I have Terabytes on storage on SATA interface - as is shown under the storage tab: 2x 4Tb HDD, 1x 1TB HDD and 1x 1TB SSD, and 2x 2Tb M2 (plus a bunch on USB)…
When I have my pagefile on HDD, no matter which one, the system will hang when I open this (big) level, but when I have it on the SATA-coupled SSD, it’s no problem at all…
The weird thing is that all drives on SATA are accessed using the same drivers:

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but that the HDD’s have issues on access (read, write, search…) which I note outside Unreal as well. Something I do not see on my other machines…
So it is clearly an issue with Windows or the drivers…

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