10/7/2016 6:33:54 PM

I'm starting to more frequently get multiple DAX Error - Out of memory pop ups, lots and lots when they occur. I got it here at church, where the machine only has 4GB or RAM, but I also got it on my laptop at home with 8GB of RAM.

I'm running Version 8.3 Production Build 9/21/2016 on both machines.

The church machine has Windows 7 64 bit that should be patched current. IT happened twice tonight. The first time I brought up task manager right after I got SSP closed, and the memory seemed to be coming down from 4GB. I did have several things open. But the second time, I had very little open and I was running task manager, which showed the memory topping at about 2.5 GB. Another oddity. When I right clicked on the icon in the task bar and selected "Close all windows", only the DAX errors closed. SSP stayed up.

At home, my laptop has Win 10 64 bit, but it does not have the 1607 update (had to back it off). I did not have SSP running, but rather SSPSS. And I had Photoshop CC and lotsa other things running.

Not sure what to do, but I wanted to report it here, anyway and get it documented while it was fresh in my brain.

Thanks.

10/7/2016 6:47:38 PM

Oh, and tonight, the main time (just did a 3rd) is when I opened a image directory with 263 items in it. It's one of our main ones and we've opened it a lot, but haven't had this happen before. This time, I was able to clear the 4-5 DAX errors, switch folders (it was showing 0 files) and then switch back and the 263 items came right up.

10/10/2016 10:18:19 AM

Joel,

Sorry to hear about your trouble.

I will need a little more detail to try and replicate.  I read through your posts a couple of times and it seems that it may be related to browsing/locating images.  It also seems that you may be doing some image editing with SSP open?  What are the sizes (pixels and MB) of the images that you are manipulating/using?  When you looked at Task Manager and it showed the 2.5GB used, what that system total used or was that just in SSP/SSB?

Have you tried clearing the cache in SSP?  Tools > Clear Cache 

When you are browsing images, do you have thumbnails on or off?  If on, try turning them off and going through the same steps to see if that changes the behavior.

Let us know if you find any repeatable steps to this.

If you have seen this on both Win10 and Win7 it is not likely an OS issue.  Assuming the image manipulation is a common thread, Do you have the same image content on both machines?

Let us know what you find.

As always, you can contact the support team and they can look at this with you and gather relevant info.

10/13/2016 7:30:39 PM

>>it seems that it may be related to browsing/locating images.
It seems that way. I'll try to pay more attention to clues if/when it happens this weekend.

>>It also seems that you may be doing some image editing with SSP open?
On my laptop (win10). I don't think I had photoshop element sopen on the church computer (Win7). I know it wasn't open the second time it happened on the church computer (with only 2.5 GB used)

>> What are the sizes (pixels and MB) of the images that you are manipulating/using?
1024x768 pixels jpegs Most of them are around 1MB or a little less.

Thumbnails are on.

>> When you looked at Task Manager and it showed the 2.5GB used, what that system total used or was that just in SSP/SSB?
That was total used.

If it happens again this week (It hasn't on my laptop) I'll note exactly what's going on. And I'll try the Tools > Clear Cache

And I'll report back.

Thanks.

10/14/2016 8:40:10 AM

Hi again Joel and thanks for the update.  Since you first posted this another user has reported a similar issue. I have been able to replicate the issue a few times so we are on the right track.  It does appear to involve the browse/search process.

Please answer the following:

Check the total number of image files in the root folder.

Check the total volume (MB/GB) of image files in the root folder.

Are you browsing for images already in the SSP folders or are you importing from an external (meaning not in the SSP folder) source?

Typically, what is path or steps you use to get/set to image files?

Thanks.

10/14/2016 5:28:10 PM

Just got my first round of DAX errors. This time accompanied by up to 5 Please Wait green bars. Tried the flush cache, but no joy.

Right click on SSP in the task bar and selecting Close Window closed the DAX errors and left SSP control panel up. But not the Please wait progress bars. Also, somewhere along the way, I got an "Unxepected error" in the notices.

Different this evening, is that PPT 2010 was up. I have left the presentation up. Task manager showed about 3.5 GB in use when I popped it up before clearing the DAX errors.

I have shutdown and restarted SSP and did the clear cache. And stopped the PPT presentation. But PPt is still up. I will need to run both tomorrow (guest speaker) and so I want to know how it will behave. (Too many animations and such to convert to SSPSS).

>>Check the total number of image files in the root folder. Check the total volume (MB/GB) of image files in the root folder.

In Images root, 58 jpg, 3 png and 3 psds. 129 folders. The files total 66.5 MB
In Images\Sermon Illustrations\TopTenImages that I was browsing, 16 images and 1 folder for a total of 7.5 MB

>>Are you browsing for images already in the SSP folders or are you importing from an external (meaning not in the SSP folder) source?
These are in the SSP images folder

>>Typically, what is path or steps you use to get/set to image files?
Generally I restore my SSPPAK that I created at home. I add a song and go to the background property, select Image browse to my folder and select the image I want. Right now it took a while to open the images folder, and then spewed DAX errors.

I had that images folder open in the Media panel and when I right clicked on the image and selected "Set as background for current item", the DAX errors started flying again.

When I restarted SSP, I selected the song I wanted to set the background for. Then navigated in the Media Panel to the same folder. The thumbnails came up immediately and I was able to right click and set as background for current program item! And SAVED the program!

I think I'll be sticking with this method for now.

Task manager is showing 2.25 GB in use with PPT also up, but not presenting.

10/14/2016 6:59:57 PM

In science there are no failures. There is only more data. (Max Headroom reference)

So I finished the program by setting backgrounds to images through the Media panel. I was able to set video backgrounds using the properties panel. However, none of our video folders have more than 2 dozen files.

However, the image background dialog had trouble with even 16 images in a folder.

Hope this helps.

10/14/2016 7:16:03 PM

One more update tonight (I hope). I had NO problems setting background images in Slide Builder. I even opened the folder with the 236 images and had no problems.

It did seem to take a bit when I save the slide show and it was only 14 slides, all full screen images. But only concerning because of the other squirrelyness going on.

10/17/2016 8:53:27 AM

Update. My co-volunteer that does this Wednesdays for the youth group said he did have the issue with Background video dialog. I tipped him off to the right click, set as background for trick. He will try to document what other issues he has. We are in discussion to get the ram up from 4GB to 8 and perhaps a better video card than the 720.

10/20/2016 11:32:35 AM

Anything specific you'd like me to try tomorrow night, when I go in to do the program?

10/20/2016 12:05:18 PM

I am still digging into this but it seems to be related to the number of images rather than the size of the images.

Can you go to your root image folder and tell me how many total images you have in the SSP Images folder?

Thanks.

10/20/2016 7:16:18 PM

On my laptop (Windows 10, 8 GB of RAM) I have 8209 files and 519 folders. I can get the numbers off of the church computer tomorrow night.

Maybe I should spend some quality time cleaning. 8-/

10/21/2016 4:29:11 PM

On the projection computer at church (4 GB or RAM running Windows 7 64-bit)

images - 19,131 Files, 862 Folders
Videos - 1,052 Files, 96 Folder

10/21/2016 6:25:09 PM

OK. I've just spent almost two hours of "quality time" with the images and video folders. They are now at



Images - 2,751 Files, 129 Folders (2.32 GB)

Folders - 899 Files, 83 Folders (42.9 GB)



We'll see how it goes.

10/21/2016 8:31:45 PM

and.... NO DAX ERROR TONIGHT!

I did not hold back at all setting the backgrounds that were constantly throwing DAX errors and there was not a hiccup.

Hope that helps you find the problem.

10/24/2016 9:48:48 AM

Thanks Joel - that does seem to reinforce that we are headed in the right direction.

10/31/2016 9:18:52 AM

The other folks that do SSP are having trouble with setting the background to a video. they go into the background properties select the video button and in some folders, SSP just hangs. they don't get the DAX error, it just hangs. And only the first 3 or 4 thumbnails populate.

They said it was some folders that had more videos than others, but I couldn't get any specifics.

10/31/2016 1:53:24 PM

Thanks for the continued info drops. If you can have them check (or you check) how many total videos in the SSP tree that might be a good data point though if you are not getting the memory error it may be something different.   Additional info on the system during the hang (CPU and mem utilization) would be more helpful in this case I think.

As always, consistent, specific steps to replicate are the best data you can provide.

Happy Halloween!

11/2/2016 6:23:28 AM

I see I mislabeled the video count before

Videos - 899 Files, 83 Folders (42.9 GB)

I'll see if I can get my team to collect some data.

11/2/2016 8:44:14 AM

Thanks again Joel.

As always the best process for this would be to contact the support team so they can replicate and gather system information.   If you have the steps nailed down before you contact them that saves time but in either case they would still need to gather important system info for the escalation.

11/7/2016 10:53:54 AM

More data. The first time they go to set a video background, it takes about 5 minutes for the folder list to come up, but it does come up. After that, there is no delay at all.

I'm on the next two weeks, so I'll try it this weekend and if I can duplicate it, I should have a chance to call it in on the 18th.

11/9/2016 8:14:40 PM

This is getting weird.

Now we are occasionally getting an activation error on SSP startup.

Tonight it said it needed to be activated. The operator rebooted, but the message remained. He waited a half hour and was able to start up SSP w/0 the error.

11/10/2016 9:58:44 AM

Hey Joel.

What OS do you have on that machine with the odd activation behavior?  Is that the one with Windows 7?

11/11/2016 11:49:25 AM

Yes. Windows 7 pro x64.

The account is a non-admin. If I get it tonight, I'll try with the admin account.

11/11/2016 12:36:04 PM

Posted By Joel Osborn on 11 Nov 2016 11:49 AM
Yes. Windows 7 pro x64.

The account is a non-admin. If I get it tonight, I'll try with the admin account.

Just to make sure I don't derail this thread:
The issue you mentioned regarding the activation "delay" on your Win 7 system is most likely not related to the admin vs. not-admin accounts or the DAX error.  

I have sent you an email to discuss this further.

1/8/2017 11:05:34 AM

We just ran in to this - was there ever a solution?
Delay, then tins of PAX errors. Everything was fine until 3 days ago, not sure what if anything changed.
It happens when changing background to an image or video.
It does not happen displaying an image directly from the media panel.

The workaround to right click from the media panel worked for the next service.

I will call support tomorrow, but if there is a know fix I could use now. 

Thanks,
Mark

1/9/2017 8:39:51 AM

The work around I used was to drastically reduce the number of files in our Images and Videos folder tree.

Before, I had:
images - 19,131 Files, 862 Folders
Videos - 1,052 Files, 96 Folder

After my culling, we ended up with:
Images - 2,751 Files, 129 Folders (2.32 GB)
Folders - 899 Files, 83 Folders (42.9 GB)

I've not seen that problem since.

1/9/2017 12:13:08 PM

Thanks Joel.
I don't think we have anywhere near that number, but I will go to the computer today and take a look.
In no luck, I'll call support.

1/10/2017 1:00:33 PM

Before, I had:
images - 19,131 Files, 862 Folders
Videos - 1,052 Files, 96 Folders

Gee, Joel, I thought I was a pack rat when it came to images and videos (~13,000 & 500), but you
got me beat! And, although I feel I have a pretty big file organization, you got me there, too. With files
several layers deep, smarter file selection by SSP would be nice. As I remember, vs 7 was pretty good about
returning you to folder last used for a particular job, e.g. background image for songs -- since then, not as
handy.

1/10/2017 4:54:09 PM

I got back to the computer to follow up on this, and evidently I'm a bigger pack rat than I thought. 
We had 9000 images in 300 folders. I moved the photo archive outside of the SSP folder structure, greatly reducing this number, and everything worked fine.
So by adding 3 videos and 5 images last week, I found the straw that broke the camel's back.

Thanks again for the help here!
Mark

4/10/2017 8:39:58 AM

Having to limit the number of image files doesn't seem like a good solution to the
problem, it just avoids it. I never get this error if I select images or videos from the Media
File Panel and the thumbnails come up almost instantaneously (we have a SSD).
If I try to set the "blank" slide via Slide Properties/All Media/Blank Slide/File/Select
it says "searching" and takes a long time and often gives the DAX error out of
memory. No other program on the computer has any trouble accessing my SSP
directory of images (12k files, 230 folders) so I think that this is a SSP problem.
I hope it gets fixed in a hurry.

4/22/2017 8:41:55 AM

If you don't know how to fix this, could you at least let us know what the
limits are for files and folders. That way we could be forewarned for potential
problems.

4/26/2017 4:25:48 PM

Dick,

There is a KB article on this issue that addresses some of that.

There are no hard limits that have been reported or discovered.  The KB states that we replicated with as few as 5000 media files (which is still quite a lot) but others have reported different amounts and different scenarios.

Yes it has been replicated but there are also a lot of people and systems that do not have this behavior at all.

This does appear to happen more often when setting the Blank Slide but has been reported elsewhere as well.

4/27/2017 8:20:50 AM

I have two very similar PC's; both with Win10 and 500 Gb SSDs.  One is the projection
PC at church, the other my workstation at home. Both have identical image and video
files with the same folder structure. The church PC always has this problem with blank
slides, my home PC has never had it!

5/13/2017 11:52:03 AM

Almost ditto. My laptop is windows 10 and the projection computer is Windows 7. I'm not sure the images and videos folders are identical, but they are close.

5/13/2017 12:23:58 PM

Can't understand why SPP is having problems when Windows isn't, especially
with fast SSD. And SSP doesn't have the problem consistently in various
operations -- in my case, only Blank Side.

7/30/2017 5:45:23 AM

Well, I have been using 8.3 for about three weeks and this morning my SSP was infected with the DAX Error. Fortunately I still have SSP 8.0 installed, and I was able to add backgrounds using 8.0 without the DAX Error. If there is no fix for the DAX Error, I will just go back to SSP 8.0 to create everything. The only reason I am using 8.3 is for the countdown to the 1/4 hour, so I can create with 8.0 and modify the SSB with the countdown in 8.3.

The DAX Error even happened in an image folder with only 41 items, so I doubt it has anything to do with the quantity of images. It would really suck to have to have folders with less than 40 images in each folder.

7/31/2017 1:15:23 PM

Gary,

Was this setting the Blank Slide or just a background elsewhere?

Every situation seems a little different but it is not just number of files in a particular folder.  How many do you have in the whole images tree?

Just to narrow the issue you can try taking some out of the tree to see if the behavior changes.

At this point we do not have a specific answer for this.

You could also try 8.4

7/31/2017 2:24:08 PM

Posted By George Taylor on 31 Jul 2017 01:15 PM

Gary,



Was this setting the Blank Slide or just a background elsewhere?



Every situation seems a little different but it is not just number of files in a particular folder.  How many do you have in the whole images tree?



Just to narrow the issue you can try taking some out of the tree to see if the behavior changes.



At this point we do not have a specific answer for this.



You could also try 8.4

It was for any background setting.

Right-Click a song, hover over slide properties and click background...

After setting all backgrounds with 8.0, and then opening again in 8.3 to be able to use the SSB timers, I tried editing a song later in the program. When I saw the "Searching..." taking longer than normal, I quickly clicked a folder with less than 30 images (the one I actually wanted, fortunately) and was able to change the image without the DAX Error.

8/20/2017 7:50:33 AM

I will try to find time to upgrade to 8.4, but a trace file help?

I am basically using 8.0 to select background images, and then opening the SSB in 8.3 to add in the countdown and saving it with 8.3 file name. That way I have an 8.0 version that I can edit and an 8.3 version that I can display with a countdown timer.

9/1/2017 2:47:16 PM

when we have this problem, I've found if I select the item I want to set the background in the program panel and then, in the data panel, navigate to the image or video you want to use, right click and select set as background for current item, that avoids the DAX error. Of course, that doesn't help if you want to do a layered background.

Cleaning out the images and video directories in my SSP folder has eliminated those problems for me.