RetroPie randomly freezing/crashing while browsing through game lists.

beastmode

I am experiencing frequent, yet random freezing while browsing through game lists that have more than 100 rom files. Manually pulling the plug on the Raspberry Pi is the only solution as SSH is no longer accessible. I have scraped images, videos, and marquee files for each system with the Sselph Scraper, which display and play perfectly using the omxplayer player. The system does not freeze at all during gameplay or system selection. This issue began shortly after installing the latest version of RetroPie 4.2. Any help solving this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Device: Raspberry Pi 3, overclocked to 1.35 ghz, running RetroPie 4.2 with more than adequate cooling.
Controllers: Wired PS4, XBOX 360 controllers.

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode what is your vram set at? Are you using the omx player?

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy vram is set to 150 mb at the moment, and omx player is enabled.

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode 150 is way to high! Set your vram to 100 and test. If that doesn't work go down to 80.

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy I'll try going down to 80. I had it set to 100 before I raised it to 150. I'll test in the morning and let you know the results.

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy The crashes persist with vram set to 80 mb.

pjft

OK. I want to dig into this a bit more.

What's you emulationstation version, what theme are you using, and can you consistently replicate it?

If I'd send you over an older build (or if you are able to compile things on your own) I'd be keen on having you test it to a certain extent until we can narrow this down to something more concrete (version, feature set, etc).

I had that happen to me today for the first time in several months of active usage, on my SNES system but alas I couldn't replicate it afterwards.

Are you using the auto collections? What system(s) does this happen in?

Appreciate your feedback and assistance here.

Thanks in advance.

beastmode

@pjft 4.2.14 but the problem started under 4.2.10. I'm using @tmntturtlguy's Comic Book theme. I'm not using auto collections. The problem occurs completely at random, in all system gamelist menus, regardless of theme. I'm unable to replicate the issue for any specific rom or system. The system crashes most frequently when I'm scrolling through the gamelist rom by rom rather than jumping around the menu.

I have the following systems installed:

Atari 2600 (126 roms), Atari 7800 (40 roms), Final Burn Alpha (398 roms), Game Gear (177 roms), Game Boy (316 roms), Game Boy Advance (309 roms), Game Boy Color (244 roms), Master Syatem (270 roms), Mega Drive (338 roms), Nintendo (372 roms), NeoGeo Pocket Color (44 roms), PC Engine (93 roms), Super Nintendo (278 roms).

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode what are the file sizes for your scraped videos and images? Along time ago I had similar issues, when I say along time ago I mean way back in retropie 4.1 and emulationstation when the video was very first introduced. By reducing my images, wheelart, and video file sizes it removed the problem. This may not be your situation as Es and retropie have changed so much, but it might be worth trying.

pjft

Thanks. What EmulationStation version are you in, though? Press start and see.

Are you comfortable with ssh?

Thanks.

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy marquee files range in size from 3 KB to 137 KB, images files from 185 KB to 790 KB, and video viles from 826 KB to 8 KB.

beastmode

@pjft I'm pretty comfortable with SSH. I know my way around, more or less. EmulationStation - v2.4.1rp, built Aug 3 2017 - 17:01:17

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode the marquee sizes look good, the image sizes in the 700kb might cause some issues in large lists or if using a theme that loads images and videos. I keep my images in the 200kb or lower. I use a png compression program so I don't lose to much quality, but the images are far from HD. I also assume some of your videos are 8mb (your post says 8kb) i don't know a ton about video sizes but I know reduced mine to 320x240 and my file sizes are much smaller.

I hope @pjft has some suggestions, but I would make a copy of all your scraped files and the run a batch convert of your videos using handbreak and a batch reduction in png using a program called riot.

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy Great advice, dude. I'll give that a try right now.

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy Would you say 2 mb to 4 mb for video files is okay?

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode yeah, that sounds a lot better to me. The smaller the better as long as you are ok with the quality

beastmode

@tmntturtlguy The quality looks just fine to me at 320x240. The images I don't care so much about since the videos are front and center in my setup with your theme =). I'll test for a few and let you know if your suggestion solved my problem.

pjft

Ok all - and adding @BigMan1982 here as he reported the same.

Thanks for bringing this up. If you're keen and open to helping us get to the bottom of this, I'm willing to try my best to figure out what may be happening here.

There are two or three things that I'd ideally want to get to. Bear in mind, though, that consistently getting your Pi to a state where it freezes and you have to pull the plug is not ideal, as you may end up corrupting your SD card, so I'd strongly recommend making a backup of your system and ROMs - regardless of whether you'll be helping test this or not.

Now that I got that out of the way, these are the things I'd be keen on narrowing down:

Exact (or semi-reliable) steps to make it get to that state;
Features that may be related to the behavior;
Version where that might have been introduced - as a proxy to what changes might have brought that up.

Now, for 1, it seems some of you - at least you, @beastmode - seem to have an "easier" time making it happen more frequently.

Would it be possible to ask you to SSH into your Pi, and then run "top", and while it's running attempt to get the Pi into that freezing state? I'd be keen on learning what exactly is happening in the background - if any process starts using up all the memory, if there are any ghost processes dangling, etc. I fact, if you'd want to do it with "htop" instead (you can install it via sudo apt-get install htop) it tends to provide some more details.

Thanks. Also, given that you will have a session connected to the Pi, you may be able to force it to shutdown properly (fingers crossed).

For 2., after this test, I'd probably suggest testing replicating the same behavior in two distinct scenarios: the first, disabling OMX Player (go to Start Menu > Other Settings > Turn "Use OMX Player" to "OFF"). If you don't have OMX Player turned on, then ignore this.

After this - whether you managed to replicate it or not - turn OMX Player back on, and then in the UI settings set it to only display the "Detailed" gamelist. See if you can get it to the same state. This is a very random bug, so don't give up immediately as we may end up disregarding features that may be related, just by pure coincidence of not being able to replicate it.

Once again, always with SSH and htoprunning.

For 3. we'll get to that after we have a bit more data here, if possible. But it'll likely involve me providing older builds to try to track it down further, or asking you to compile some builds on your own if you are comfortable with that. Likely I'll also try to provide a debug build with a lot of logging so that we can hopefully get more data there.

It'd also be helpful from both of you, @beastmode and @BigMan1982 to get a status on:

VRAM setting
ES version
Controller you're using (in particular, bluetooth or wired)
OMX Player or not

Thank you all in advance. I know this will take some of your precious free time, so I am mindful of that. I appreciate any help you can provide here, so that hopefully we can fix this (as long as it can be fixed) for everyone.

I'll also try to chase this down, but I haven't been able to replicate it since yesterday so I'm hoping one of you has a bit more luck with it.

Have a great Sunday, thank you!

beastmode

@pjft I'm only experiencing this problem at the game list menu, never in game or at the system selection screen. Slowly browsing a large game list menu for any system, from top to bottom, pausing for a second or two on each game selection while the scraped video file plays is when my system crashes at random.

OMX Player: enabled
Theme: Comic Book Theme created by @tmntturtlguy
Device Temperature: CPU: 47°C/116°F GPU: 47°C/116°F
VRAM: currently set to 80mb. crashing continued with 100 as well.
ES Version: EmulationStation - v2.4.1rp, built Aug 3 2017 - 17:01:17
Controller: usb connected PS4 controller | usb connected XBOX 360 controller
HTOP: installed. memory usage steadily in the 155mb range while browsing game lists.
Image Artwork: images and marquee .png files, enabled and displaying properly. file size varies from 3kb to 750kb.
Video Artwork: 320x240 .mp4 files, enabled and displaying properly. file size varies from 813kb to 4.5mb.
Overclock: 1.4 ghz. gpu_mem=400, arm_freq=1400, over_voltage=6, sdram_freq=500, core_freq=500, gpu_freq=400, gpu_mem_256=128, gpu_mem_512=256, gpu_mem_1024=256

Steps taken after experiencing the problem, but didn't correct it:

lowering the overclock to 1.35 ghz and 1.3 ghz.
reducing video and image file sizes
updated RetroPie setup and all core packages
changed theme to carbon

TMNTturtlguy

@beastmode - when you start up, do you see a White or Black ES background before it loads to the system select screen?

@pjft - What version did you implement all of the final updates to ES to make it run better? I am wondering if that is the issue?

@beastmode there was an update a while back that @pjft made a ton of updates to how ES uses memory and loads textures. This allowed not only the ComicBook theme to run better, but also made it possible for so many of the new cool themes we are seeing today. I am wondering if you are still on an a version of ES prior to those updates? Can you try to run the carbon theme and see if the problems still exist? You may have already tried this, so i apologize for asking. I assume the file size reduction has not helped? I still see you listing your images as high as 750kb.

Thanks