EmulationStation often crashing when using themes other than the default

pjft

Hi all.

If you currently install the emulationstation-dev package from source and turn on threaded loading again, we just pushed a fix that we hope has addressed the previous issues.

If someone who used to be able to replicate this consistently can try it out we'd love the feedback as we can't replicate it on our end.

WeirdH

@pjft Sorry, lost track of this topic, mostly because my freezing was solved months ago by setting 'only parse gamelists' to on. I only just installed the -dev version yesterday, now with threaded loading set to true. Will report back if I encounter anything of note.

Lolonois

If I connect the dots here and in addition to the merged changes [1] @pjft was referring to, I see also the option that the file log might choke caused by a specific combination of many log writes, threaded loading and slower file operations by rpi3 and/or sd-card (or even undervoltaging, which is crucial to sd-card operations).

While I am unable to reproduce it, it might be considered to reduce the log output of missing theme resources by lowering the log level (WARNING to DEBUG). It would reduce the probability of file log chokes and would also speed up the normal ES boot:

diff --git a/es-core/src/ThemeData.cpp b/es-core/src/ThemeData.cpp
index cb1b265..45b54a6 100644
--- a/es-core/src/ThemeData.cpp
+++ b/es-core/src/ThemeData.cpp
@@ -517,11 +517,11 @@ void ThemeData::parseElement(const pugi::xml_node& root, const std::map<std::str
                        if(!ResourceManager::getInstance()->fileExists(path))
                        {
                                std::stringstream ss;
-                               ss << "  Warning " << error.msg; // "from theme yadda yadda, included file yadda yadda
+                               ss << "  Message " << error.msg; // "from theme yadda yadda, included file yadda yadda
                                ss << "could not find file \"" << node.text().get() << "\" ";
                                if(node.text().get() != path)
                                        ss << "(which resolved to \"" << path << "\") ";
-                               LOG(LogWarning) << ss.str();
+                               LOG(LogDebug) << ss.str();
                        }
                        element.properties[node.name()] = path;
                        break;

Additionally a mutex for log file write operations might be used as outlined here [2] to make fprintf() [3] thread safe.

[1] github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/pull/774/files#diff-20f861dd5841312f45eb90d5a56cd5addad0657c66605d6235696a345907e15d
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43427405/c-writing-to-a-file-in-multithreaded-program
[3] https://github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation/blob/52c04d77864287aa0ae7f484460966d8253079df/es-core/src/Log.cpp#L77