SSDR Display Hanging

K1FR

Have a feeling this is a problem with my computer and not SSDR or my 6700.  But, just wondering if any others have seen the following:  at what appears to be random intervals my SSDR screen hangs for perhaps a half second or so.  Panadapter freezes, and the waterfall shows a black bar during the outage. Audio continues fine, and data is going out via DAX without apparent interruption. Best I can tell after a few experiments, this happens regardless of band, mode, and number of slices open.  This issue began yesterday - no such problems prior.

Computer is Win 7 Pro, i7, 16 gig memory, with an NVIDIA graphics card.  No graphics updates for some time.  No intentional changes to the computer (hardware or new software installation).  Only known changes are the normal Windows updates. Been a bit since I ran a DPC latency check, but never had any issues there.

Thanks for any suggestions how to go about additional debugging.

Tom, K1FR

Richard G7EIX

There are many tools out there to allow you to drill down into the processes to see where hiccups are occurring.   One I use on a daily basis is Process Explorer written by one of the Fellows at Microsoft - Mark Russinovich.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

You can leave the application running while you are running SmartSDR and watch for spikes in CPU, GPU, I/O and Memory.     

In the example shown on the page I have linked to - if you move your mouse over the graphs shown it will show you the process with the highest utilization at that time - so while watching your Panadapter, make a note of where the 'blip' occurs and see if you can see a process that is kicking in that may be causing the freeze.

Using this utility, you can also perform a visual check for processes you have running in the background, scheduled updaters, AV, Malware Detection, toolbar utilities etc - and see if any are hogging CPU cycles.

George KF2T

If you drop the video load - less FPS, waterfall rate, does it help? May be taxing the video card some.

Steve N4LQ

This happened to me today for the first time. I was sending CW, about 27 wpm, and suddenly the screen froze for about half a second. Nothing else happened. In the past I've a couple of transmit freezes. When sending, suddenly the sidetone went silent and a few elements were not transmitted. I assumed this was the rig's fault. FLex 6300, Win 8.1....

DK1EY

Had the same "problem" here with a mid 2010 MacBook Pro i7 with 8GB RAM. With my desktop machine (i7, 4790K, 32GB RAM, GForce 780Ti) no issues!

For me this excludes the Flex 6300 as the source of the problem. 

K1FR

Thanks to all for suggestions. Tonight, the display is rock solid.  Nothing changed that I am aware of.  If/when it occurs again will try out the suggestions.  Thanks again.  73, Tom K1FR

K1FR

Still have not had recurrence of issue. Played with waterfall and other display settings trying to induce it. Strange! Thanks again for advice. More if it happens again. 73, atom K1FR