Any surprises found on the beta released 5/6/22? I haven’t found any yet but need to decide if it’s “safe” to use the beta for a live gig this weekend. Thanks!
This beta is principally optimisations for background mode with dynamic throttle of frames per seconds because Apple limit ressources around 60% on single core only
So would that infer that Photon would run better on a multi core Ipad?
Yes it could infer but it prevents background random crashes (after a few time).
We prefer to loose exceptionally some DMX frames than have the app crash. It is the same calculation way used in video games with dynamic FPS (frames par second).
This beta is also Hera yo fix some bugs.
OK - thanks for the reply. I haven’t had time to install this beta yet but hopefully soon. I’m not currently using Photon for an active show so I’m not sure how helpful my feedback would be.
I’m more useful for testing new features. If you have a list of bug fixes I might be able test/verify those once I get it installed.
I ran through my show at home and saw no issues. But the real test will be tonight’s live show with 4 hours of OnSong triggering Photon (and my keyboard) via MIDI for each song change. Fingers crossed…
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I ran the Photon beta during my live show last night. Apparently I received the “45001 wakeups over the last 151 seconds (299 wakeups per second average), exceeding limit of 150 wakeups per second over 300 seconds” error 3 times during the gig (see attached IPS log file example). However, it was only at the start of the 3rd set (11pm UTC-5) that I noticed that when I brought Photon from the background to the foreground I was presented with the main screen where I had to pick my show and restart Photon. Should this be expected behavior with the latest beta version?
Thank you for theses informations, we have to work on this wakeup limitations.
When you bring photon from background ton foreground your screen don’t have to change, it must be the exactly same state than when you put it in background. I think that the app was restating before you bring it to foreground, we have to check this.
Thank you for your feedback very useful as usual !
First major crash with the latest Photon2 beta… Unfortunately it occurred in the middle of a live performance. I also had 4 additional “Photon.wakeup_resource” warnings the rest of the night but this 1st crash resulted in a dark stage until I could finish playing the current song and reboot Photon.
You can see when the crash occurs at the start of a chase at the 40min, 30sec mark in this video:
Log file attached:
Photon-2022-06-04-194114.ips (26.2 KB)
Has there been any opportunity to analyze the latest crash data? I have another live performance on 6/18 and hope to not experience the same failure. Thanks.
Hope I didn’t make a bad decision - just purchased the PRO version so I could run my lights in the background to my BandHelper and X32 apps… I have v2.3 and it seems to keep running my sequence fine as a background app, but it doesn’t seem to accept my MIDI commands to change sequence from BandHelper while in the background? Is this part of the changes in v 2.4 Beta? Otherwise, I just wasted my money… and I do have it in LIVE mode btw
Version 2.3 supports both background mode and triggrring via MIDI (I use it in live gigs now). Ver 2401 beta was supposed to improve efficiency when operating in the background to reduce freezes/crashes.
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Cool, thanks… I must have something wrong somewhere. Did I read somewhere there is a Channel issue? My lights are using Channel 16 from BandHelper, but I don’t think that matters to Photon as it only registered the CC value for the sequence when I set it up.
EDIT: Solved my issue - apparently Photon v2.3 only works using Channel 1, which is a real prob as my Midas board is hard coded to Channel 1 and I can’t change it… no telling what commands I am sending it thinking I am changing light sequence. Will need Photon to fix that one. Possible @Cclleemm ?
I use OnSong to send MIDI to my DMX lights via Photon on channel 1 and also send patch changes to my Roland synth on channel 2.
I had another crash with Photon in the background during a live performance last night. Had a new sort of failure log (attached). Hoping for some analysis and insight.
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We had integrate multi-channel in this beta version. It will fix your bug but we have not released the 2.4 yet cause to bugs feedbacks. We have to work on it.
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@cclleemm : i think we need to set log level on user settings, some users are huge logs files(see iron crash report system), so we can ask them to activate tracing mode instead of leave it on
@mchrysoc : the current beta version log in debug mode to trace the dmx framerate when the app is in background. Apple is very hard with background apps with high consumption and your logs show us we cannot write more than 12.40 ko/s in background
It’s a very low limit if you have huge database or in this version a verbose output
Apple imposes hard limitations to I/O and calculation power in background
I‘m not completely sure, but maybe iPadOS 16 (comes in this fall) sets lower restrictions for the background apps? iPadOS16 allows 16 gigabytes of ram for every app and iPad, also if the iPad hasn‘t got this huge storage. Maybe they also changed something for this problem.
@djgreg13 Does this imply the verbose mode of logging the beta version is actually putting a greater load on my iPad in Photon background mode and is making the crash /freeze situation worse?
I don’t think my show design could be considered a “huge database” (8 Pars, 2 moving heads, and 1 gigbar = 107 DMX channels), right?
@flupsi : rules are special for background
iOS and iPadOS allow background in specific cases, with derogations and very hard limitations
@mchrysoc : no project is not to big but one raise us a bug and he has 20 copies of the project so the database has become huge.
The load is higher on storage iO and raise a background limitation
There is a lot of limitations with auto kill in background
- CPU load
- storage IO
- network usage
- cpu calls
Etc…