v1.68 Continuous Crashes

[TripleThreat]

Bitcomet 1.68 has been crashing extremely badly and renders itself unusable. I am only at 1700 active torrent tasks and left Bitcomet alone for like 10 minutes or so and it self would crash. That happened multiple times. 1.67 doesn't have this program. I use Windows 7.

Edited June 24, 2020 by TripleThreat (see edit history)

[Rhubarb]

1,700 active torrents is a huge number. I did have problems with Bitcomet and, in the end, that was the culprit (I reduced the number of active torrents and everything worked fine afterwards). Remember that seeding does use up memory and CPU time.

ps - you do know that even MS doesn't support Windows 7

[TripleThreat]

9 hours ago, Rhubarb said:

1,700 active torrents is a huge number. I did have problems with Bitcomet and, in the end, that was the culprit (I reduced the number of active torrents and everything worked fine afterwards). Remember that seeding does use up memory and CPU time.

ps - you do know that even MS doesn't support Windows 7

With the current problems and critical bugs that have been plaguing BitComet for many versions now, 1700 tasks are no problem for the software 1.67 and those before it to handle. I have only count such crashes at 1.68.

1.68 crashes are actual crashes with Windows force quitting it by itself, while 1.67 and those versions before  are  so slow and unresponsive that Windows asks you if you want to give up and quit BitComet.

Edited June 25, 2020 by TripleThreat (see edit history)

[Rhubarb]

That's the point I made- that the load on the RAM and CPU are so great they force the lack of response. You are simply trying to do too much at the same time

[Tin Ching]

It has nothing to do with the RAM and CPU, we are on top end machines with heaps of RAM and CPU. You can try this option, I've managed to solve the hang issue. Go to Advanced settings, and set this to true. No more hanging on my machine, and the XML files each is less than 1MB as it will only save those peer IPs that is connected to you.

With SSD and heaps of RAM, it won't even cause my machine a sweat.

[Tin Ching]

If all your files are on an SSD drive, way to go! There shouldn't be any more hang.

[Tin Ching]

Also, you may want to set this to a lower number, as the default (1000) is way to high! Setting this too high will jam your Internet connection.

 

[TripleThreat]

v1.68 is no good for me so I have downgraded back to the v1.67. I am finally going to upgrade to Win 10 once my new hard drives arrive. Then I will give v1.68 a try again.

I am going to give your suggestions a try, Tin, and will report back. I have 950 EVO as my main drive and 128G of ram, so I think I can handle the changes. I do see the  network_max could have been an issue for me since I have outdated router.

[Rhubarb]

Just as a point of information - I have 29 active files (upload and download) and BC is using 300 MB of Ram. What it will take for well over 1,000 active files is something I'd rather not even think about

[TripleThreat]

To give you another perspective, my other fresh Win 10 computer is currently running 12 upload tasks with 30G of actual files and with no active download tasks at 1.1GB of Ram and 3.0MB/s uploads.

[TripleThreat]

I have upgraded my main computer to WIn 10 but v1.68 still crashes my computer.

Changes made to the options do not seem to work as starting a large batch of tasks would still halts BitComet to a stall and in need of a manual force quit.

[Rhubarb]

At the risk of repeating myself - try reducing the number of active files

[Tin Ching]

There is a chance your files are hashing due to an improper exit of the program, i havent upgrade to 1.68 so not sure 1.68 has an issue. If theres no hashing, i cant explain why it will slow just starting a task. If this is the case, u need start one by one as hashing do intensive reads. 

[TripleThreat]

On 7/1/2020 at 3:20 AM, Tin Ching said:

There is a chance your files are hashing due to an improper exit of the program, i havent upgrade to 1.68 so not sure 1.68 has an issue. If theres no hashing, i cant explain why it will slow just starting a task. If this is the case, u need start one by one as hashing do intensive reads. 

It could be but the interesting thing is if I ran  the program for like 8 hours, the BitComet had no problem of shutting things down quickly. But if I ran the program for like two days, it would have problems shutting down. That is given I ran the same amount of torrent tasks and the same tasks in both scenarios.  I think it is more due to RAM issue than anything.

Speaking of 1.68, which I had problem running it and skipped back to 1.67. I ran 1.69 recently. It initially crashed a couple of times but then it became stable. That is I didn't restart computer in the trial to get it stable. Very interesting. I can vouch for 1.69. It is very NICE indeed.

[TripleThreat]

11 hours ago, TripleThreat said:

It could be but the interesting thing is if I ran  the program for like 8 hours, the BitComet had no problem of shutting things down quickly. But if I ran the program for like two days, it would have problems shutting down. That is given I ran the same amount of torrent tasks and the same tasks in both scenarios.  I think it is more due to RAM issue than anything.

Speaking of 1.68, which I had problem running it and skipped back to 1.67. I ran 1.69 recently. It initially crashed a couple of times but then it became stable. That is I didn't restart computer in the trial to get it stable. Very interesting. I can vouch for 1.69. It is very NICE indeed.

Nevermind, first time I left 1.69 running overnight and the computer crashed. Found the computer blackscreen in the morning. Don't know if the cause of the crash was from BitComet, though very likely is.

[Tin Ching]

Hi,

I also have some crashes with BitComet [Bluescreen (memory management) + hard disk freeze (reset to device error) + complete freeze], especially when I increase the number of concurrent tasks.

From what I found so far, Bluescreen & reset to device error is  tightly related to the below setting:

This is what I found on my machine in the event logs:

Reset to device on raid port 0, issued by istorahci , something like that

A lot of of the crashes BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), hard disk device reset can be fixed by lowering the IO priority of BitComet,

I've tested this when I run many concurrent tasks, and install some other programs which requires intensive IO as well, it will crash my machine. But if I lower the IO priority of bitcomet, Windows will automatically slow down BitComet's IO request and let the other program utilize IO in higher priority.

Windows has many scheduled tasks that will suddenly require intensive IO requests, so this setting is very handy. If nothing is using IO, BitComet will use full bandwidth, but as soon as other programs needs IO requests, BitComet immediately drops the bandwidth usage by Windows.

For the sudden OS freeze, I'm still investigating, will let you know what i find in the upcoming days.

 

[Tin Ching]

By the way, how many GBs did you allocate to your disk cache?

[TripleThreat]

I have left the disk cashe to default that is:

Max cache size 1024 MB

Max Disk Cach Size for LT Seeding: 1024

Shrink: 50MB

I left my system.io.priority to normal and low.priority false.

I have never experienced OS freeze but most definitely had BitComet program freeze.

For 1.69 while starting 1000 tasks on top of 1000 active tasks would still render BitComet dead for 5 hours long and unable to recover, I can grow my active tasks to full 5000 tasks if I do it in batches (though it takes half a day). I have successfully left my computer over night the second try without crashing and I didn't change any setting at all. The memory grow seems reasonable now in 30G range as before it would likely grown into 50G range (don't quote me on this though).

I think the way BitComet draws way too much IO when activating tasks at once without staggering. Hence, it put stress on the computer/chipset badly.

I have just brought a HBA card. I would like to think it might help take the load off the computer/chipset but I am no computer guy. I also currently use a PCIE x1 SATA card. I think it might bottleneck the IO required for BitComet. I am going to remove that card once I have the HBA card installed and see if anything improves.

Edited July 27, 2020 by TripleThreat (see edit history)

[Tin Ching]

Hi TripleThreat,

I think definitely you need to increase the disk cache size! This is the most crucial setting for torrenting.  You should set it as high as possible that your RAM can handle, but let it auto shrink when your RAM is below a certain number, then you are utilizing your RAM fully. If RAM is not used fully, it's wasted RAM, this is the most valuable resource your computer have, not the disk though. The auto shrink feature is very nice, when your programs or OS need to use more RAM, BitComet will reduce the cache size to let room for other stuff that needs RAM.

I suggest you install this program https://dennisbabkin.com/ctm/ , it's a system tray icon that shows the usage of your system resources, e.g. RAM, CPU, disk. You will then see how much your disk is stressed at.

I am using my OS SSD to be used for BitComet (windows & Bitcomet on the same disk). Therefore, if BitComet settings is not set correctly, you can easily crash Windows. If you are thrashing the OS disk at 100%, I don't think Windows can last more than half hour, and it will die. But if you have the files in another drive rather than the OS drive, it should be fine and Windows won't die. But with that 1GB cache size, you won't be able to download/upload in high speed, as the disk may be stressed out.

I have 16GB RAM, set the disk cache size 10GB, shrink when it is below 750MB. My SSD is able to be kept at 50% less disk usage, and the temperature of the disk is maxed at 37 degrees celcius. With setting like this, you won't stress your disk at 100%.

In my screenshot attached, you can see my RAM usage is at 93%, CPU 9%, OS disk 37%. If you want your computer not die for a long time, you need to aim for the disk usage as low as possible by leveraging your RAM.

The best would be of course have all the sharing files sitting in a different SSD (not the Windows SSD), but it's not cheap.

 

Edited July 27, 2020 by Tin Ching (see edit history)

[TripleThreat]

1 hour ago, Tin Ching said:

Hi TripleThreat,

I think definitely you need to increase the disk cache size! This is the most crucial setting for torrenting.  You should set it as high as possible that your RAM can handle, but let it auto shrink when your RAM is below a certain number, then you are utilizing your RAM fully. If RAM is not used fully, it's wasted RAM, this is the most valuable resource your computer have, not the disk though. The auto shrink feature is very nice, when your programs or OS need to use more RAM, BitComet will reduce the cache size to let room for other stuff that needs RAM.

I suggest you install this program https://dennisbabkin.com/ctm/ , it's a system tray icon that shows the usage of your system resources, e.g. RAM, CPU, disk. You will then see how much your disk is stressed at.

I am using my OS SSD to be used for BitComet (windows & Bitcomet on the same disk). Therefore, if BitComet settings is not set correctly, you can easily crash Windows. If you are thrashing the OS disk at 100%, I don't think Windows can last more than half hour, and it will die. But if you have the files in another drive rather than the OS drive, it should be fine and Windows won't die. But with that 1GB cache size, you won't be able to download/upload in high speed, as the disk may be stressed out.

I have 16GB RAM, set the disk cache size 10GB, shrink when it is below 750MB. My SSD is able to be kept at 50% less disk usage, and the temperature of the disk is maxed at 37 degrees celcius. With setting like this, you won't stress your disk at 100%.

In my screenshot attached, you can see my RAM usage is at 93%, CPU 9%, OS disk 37%. If you want your computer not die for a long time, you need to aim for the disk usage as low as possible by leveraging your RAM.

The best would be of course have all the sharing files sitting in a different SSD (not the Windows SSD), but it's not cheap.

 

Thanks for the write up. I would definitely try to increase my disk cache size in my next restart and report back.

Do you let BitComet to auto-choose cache size in the given range?

[Rhubarb]

What a lot of people forget is that the Windows swapfile (pagefile.sys) is dynamic by default. I always set it to at least RAM + 50% as both min and max values and also set it to a different physical drive (that avoids any disk thrashing as 'doze decides it needs more memory)The fixed size stops any other software claiming the reserved space and reducing the amount available

[Tin Ching]

21 hours ago, TripleThreat said:

Thanks for the write up. I would definitely try to increase my disk cache size in my next restart and report back.

Do you let BitComet to auto-choose cache size in the given range?

Yup, I let it auto choose cache size.

[TripleThreat]

On 7/28/2020 at 5:48 PM, Tin Ching said:

Yup, I let it auto choose cache size.

I had tried the disk cache to 20G but that didn't help the reliability of BitComet at all.

I will be switching to HBA this week. I hope that would improve BitComet's IO's.

[TripleThreat]

On 8/2/2020 at 6:51 PM, TripleThreat said:

I had tried the disk cache to 20G but that didn't help the reliability of BitComet at all.

I will be switching to HBA this week. I hope that would improve BitComet's IO's.

Nope. The HBA didn't make things smoother I think.