When Comskip Hangs

[ydekmekji]

This might be me being paranoid, but Comskip tends to work fine for me (I have comskip .69 installed) EXCEPT when I'm away. Whenever I am away for a few days and GBPVR records some shows, comskip hangs. I'm convinced that Comskip knows that I"m going to be out of town, and it decides to not work.

There is nothing logical about this, but i'm wondering if anyone has looked at the relationship between comskip and whether we are out of town...

[sub]

Did you enable the 'dont hang comskip when I'm out of town' option in config.xml?

[reboot]

ROFL
Comskip (the older version you're using) has a memory problem. It doesn't release 100% of the memory used when running. I've noticed this from 0.64 and up, although 0.71 is slightly better.
When used multiple times, it simply runs out of room to run, and the computer must be restarted (or the ram freed up some other way).
Use the same .ini you have now, and try the various other versions. I've had better memory management from 0.70 and 0.71, although poorer commercial detection, requiring more tuning.
Tipster posted that he uses a 3rd party memory management program, and it seems to work for him. I find that having 2 gig onboard helps alot as well

[ydekmekji]

You guys are awesome... it makes sense. So i'm not smokin' something Thanks REBOOT! This makes a lot of sense now. In other words, it makes sense that comskip has problems when i'm out of town. So do we wait for a newer version of comskip? Maybe Sub or someone can write a script that reboots the system on a daily basis as long as there are no other recordings?? That might help flushing the memory out automatically i suppose!

[reboot]

You can have windows restart itself at any time.
Make a shortcut, on the desktop I suppose, and have it point to this:

Code:

%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -r -t 01

Put it in the task scheduler, and set it for a time when you know there's no recordings.
You can also do shutdown thus:

Code:

%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe -s -t 01

[Jeff]

Even if comskip has a memory leak in it, since it exits after completing the analysis of a given recording, shouldn;t all of the memory be release at that time and automatically recovered by Windows? Can a console app retain memory even after its death?

Jeff

[hasso]

Who has Comskip v0.62 or v.063 that doesn't use a lot of RAM, or where can I download it from? The old links don't work...

http://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/files/comskip-0.63.zip

[Jere_Jones]

Can a console app retain memory even after its death?

No it can't. The only thing that can happen is if a console uses A LOT of ram then some other processes can have part of their memory offloaded to the swap file. When the console app exits, those offloaded bits don't necessarily get loaded back into memory until they are needed. That can cause some sluggishness after the console app exits that can give the APPEARANCE of it still using memory but it isn't.

What most memory managers do is make sure that those offloaded bits get reloaded as soon as possible so that, hopefully, they are back in RAM before they are needed.

Misinformation is worse than no information.

Jere

[ydekmekji]

But Jere... Then why does comskip ?

[Jere_Jones]

But Jere... Then why does comskip ?

My instinctive response was to simply say that it doesn't. Then I thought about it and wondered: "What if I'm wrong?" I mean, it does happen on occasion, so I set out to research the issue.

You know what?

I couldn't find a thing that confirmed it one way or the other. So I'm doing a little experiment. I wrote a batch file that will run comskip 1000 times on the same show. Since it takes about 6 minutes per run, I should have some results in about 5 days.

For now, when the process begins, it consumes 3084k of memory. Close to the end of the run, it consumes 5344k of memory. We'll see what it is like in 5 days.

Jere