Multiple CTDs - StackHash, NTDLL.dll, Sim1.dll

[Jim Young 2,356]

Hi Ray,

 

I disabled the C States in my ASUS BIOS.  I ran FSX again and also ran Process Monitor (filtered to FSX only) just to see what's happening at the time of the freeze/CTD/lockup/whatever resulting in a StackHash error (or any type of crash!).  Same flight, same things loaded as before when I got StackHash/ntdll.dll CTD's.  This time no CTD BUT, I had 7 pauses that suddenly brought my fps down from around 50 fps to 3.8 to 4.7 fps.  I wrote down the times when I saw these massive drops in fps.  I actually thought these sudden drops in fps were going to lock up FSX but the flight continued after a second or two.  After the successful flight, I looked at the process monitor to see what was happening within that minute I wrote down (getting it down to the second would be impossible).  Mostly MyTrafficX and FSDT airport stuff (every FSDT airport was loading even though I was only using the FSDT Chicago).  I had 7 different occasions where my fps dropped and at each minute, the process monitor was showing MyTrafficX and FSDT airports loading.  I also had several default scenery objects loading too, like from Area 0202.  Trucks, vehicles, boxes, buildings, etc., even though I'm flying over photoscenery.  I thought I had disabled all of the scenery I would not be using but later found that I had enabled my Orbx/FTX stuff and all of that stuff was being loaded too. Some of that was being loaded too during those fps drops.  It's photoscenery so it will load whether you are flying over that area or not taking up tons of resources.  I'm getting ready to do another flight with Orbx disabled.  I fear that my successful flight last night was a flunk.

 

Massive snowstorm coming to the Wash DC area so I will be stuck in my house for the next few days.  They are expecting 4-8 inches and, even though the snow has not arrived, they closed down the Federal government, DC government, and local governments.  This is so unbelievable I can hardly think.  The snow may arrive around noon and only if the temps get below freezing.  Right now it's nearly 40 degrees F.  It is unreal what is happening to our world.  Bunch of wimps everywhere!

 

Best regards,

[Ted Striker 338]

Interesting read Jim. I just watched a couple of Mark Russinovich's videos to better understand the use of his analysis tools. Let me us know what you think of his books.  I'm running fairly stable now. I only seem to have lockups when I change FSX settings often and quickly during testing, and usually its the traffic tab thats the culprit. For some reason appcrash doesn't pull up any results on my computer. My Windows 7 is set up per Nick's guide so I may have turned of an error reporting service that I need. I'll have to go back though the guide and check. I have a 3770k so I didn't follow Nick's overclocking guide as the Haswell bios appears to be quite different from Ivy Bridge. I do recall Nick saying that he needed to keep C states active with Haswell or at least found it performed better.

 

I just pulled up weather.gov. I agree, it doesn't look like much of a storm to me. 20 years ago we would get a 12 inch snowfall and they would delay the opening of schools until the roads were plowed, usually a couple hours. Now they tell everyone to stay home. Of course we don't, instead of going to work we head up into the mountains and go skiing.  The way things are going, in 20 years from now the governments will be declaring national disasters every time a storm comes to town.

 

Ted

[Jim Young 2,356]

My Windows 7 is set up per Nick's guide so I may have turned of an error reporting service that I need.

 

Hi Ted.  Yes, error reporting has to be turned on.  I did that once myself.  I have a registry cleaner too that cleans up any left over .wer files so it wipes out all of my crash reports.  I have fixed that until I can find a solution which I think I have found (or I should say the OP - Ray found).  Ran a flight after posting #46 above and got a StackHash 5 minutes after taking off at Chicago.  No joy!  So I decided to disable MyTrafficX 5.4c and reenable the default.  Total success.  There wasn't any of this sudden single frame rates the whole file and, according to the FSUIPC log, I had an average of 41.7 fps for the whole flight session to St Louis.  I also used the default real weather (which I am pretty sure is controlled by ASN but I did not enable ASN).  If I remember correctly, these StackHash errors really started hitting everyone when the latest version of MTX 5.4c was released in early August 2013 (my update is date 8 Aug 2013).  I will leave it disabled and see if I get anymore crashes.

 

 

I do recall Nick saying that he needed to keep C states active with Haswell or at least found it performed better.

 

Yes, exactly.  I used his guide too.  I'll wait until I know for sure the cause of MY StackHash crashes before I go back to those settings. 

 

 

 

Mark Russinovich's videos to better understand the use of his analysis tools. Let me us know what you think of his books.

 

I paid around $100 for those 3 books and know they are getting dated so I hope they help me understand memory.

 

 

 

I'm cautiously optimistic.

 

Ray, I should have listened to your earlier when you suggested it was MyTrafficX and your StackHash's quit after uninstalling or disabling MTX.  I don't want to jump the gun here though as I have been disappointed as soon as I think I have found the solution.

 

Best regards,

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

The way things are going, in 20 years from now the governments will be declaring national disasters every time a storm comes to town.

 

:LMAO: You are right about that but I think it's already 20 years from now here in the Washington DC area.  It just started snowing and snow is covering the grass but too warm for it to stick on the streets.  Back in the 90's you went to work no matter what.  Sometimes though the government would release some employees early but that would by in the afternoon time period.  They have the equipment to keep the streets clean here and do a much better job than they did back in the 1990's.  Oh well!  Got all my TP and milk yesterday so prepared to weather the storm.

 

Best regards,

[Ray Proudfoot 9,025]

Hi Jim,

 

Decided to give FSX a hammering today with a flight from Copenhagen, Denmark down to Faro on the Portuguese coast. Three hours!

 

Over NW Germany around 40 miles from DIK FSX crashed on me but strangely there was nothing that AppCrash could see although there was an entry in Event Viewer with module unknown.

 

I decided to reload from the last saved point and try it again. This time it was fine and I was able to land in Faro. Good.

 

I had a look in Event Viewer - System and noticed hundreds of entries for one type of problem. I can't remember the service but the message was - Event 2019 - The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the pool was empty.

 

I googled it and found a fix which I've applied. When these were happening I was having access problems to my shared FSX folder from another PC and ASN couldn't access FSX so I reckon it was a related problem. After the fix everything was fine.

 

EFB on the same machine as FSX was also complaining about read access to a txt file in my AppData folder and it required me to assign it to Administrators before I could grant permissions for anyone to read it. That solved the EFB problem.

 

So tomorrow I shall try another long flight across Europe. Although it was disheartening to get a FSX crash this was one I haven't had before and may be a one-off as it couldn't be repeated on a reload.

 

Regarding your problems because you have a completely different setup to me it's hard to draw comparisons. But at least the flight completed which has to be a positive.

 

I would ignore the MTX thing I talked about. I think that was down to how things are held in memory. I haven't been able to replicate that yet with the new mobo.

 

Hope you don't get too much disruption with the snow. Sounds like the authorities are H&S mad like here in the UK. But there's still no sign of winter here yet as you can see from the temp in my sig.

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

Regarding your problems because you have a completely different setup to me it's hard to draw comparisons. But at least the flight completed which has to be a positive.

 

You still have MyTrafficX 5.4c installed?  There are a lot of people suddenly getting a lot of StackHash and ntdll.dll errors so there has to be some form of commonality. 

 

Best regards,

[Ted Striker 338]

Jim, Ray,

When I have having the ntdll crashes on my system I was isolated it to MyTrafficX 5.4c. I uninstalled MyTrafficX and then reinstalled it but only to version 5.4b. This cured the crashes and allowed me to still have my add-on AI Traffic. I do not know if the problem is solely due to the 5.4c or the interaction of it with another add-on. The only way I know to determine this is to remove all of my other add-ons one by one and test. Not something I have time to do this year.

 

I just went to the Mytraffic support website and read that Burkhardt found an offending file last week in 5.4c and is asking users to remove this and report back to him. Post #28. No reports so far.

 

http://forum.simflight.com/topic/75567-mytraffic-54c-new-patch-please-read/page-2

 

Ted

[Ray Proudfoot 9,025]

You still have MyTrafficX 5.4c installed?  There are a lot of people suddenly getting a lot of StackHash and ntdll.dll errors so there has to be some form of commonality. 

 

Best regards,

 

Hi Jim,

 

Yes, still installed and Ai set to 35%. No StackHash or ntdll.dll crashes with the Giagbyte mobo so far but it's early days. I'm staying with the same settings until I get a crash and then I'll think about what to change to identify what's causing it..

 

Hi Ted,

I'll bear that in mind, thanks. But first I need to get a reproducible error which can be attributed to MTX v5.4c.

[Ted Striker 338]

FYI, I also read somewhere, probably also on the MyTrafficX support forums, that the MyTrafficX ntdll crashes were appearing to be region specific with many reported in the Southwest US. Mine were very repeatable in 5-10 minutes taking off from L35 (Big Bear City, CA) and flying west into the LA basin. As I recall, with my rapidly deteriorating memory, I was flying the Realair Duke V2.

 

Ted

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

When I have having the ntdll crashes on my system I was isolated it to MyTrafficX 5.4c. I uninstalled MyTrafficX and then reinstalled it but only to version 5.4b.

 

Same here.  I'm completely uninstalling and reinstalling 5.4b but I want to run FSX for a while to see if my StackHash crashes are gone.  I think I'll have to do several flights to be sure.  As I stated earlier, the process monitor showed mainly MyTrafficX aircraft and aiSounds being loaded most of the time, then 'poof!' fsx crashes.  I feel confident though that it has been fixed as the successful flight I had this morning had none of those sudden single fps losses and the flight was extremely smooth.  I just do not have a lot of time to test as I'm busy with my forum duties here at AVSIM. The Chicago to St Louis flight is a good test though as I have been receiving periodic crashes for a long time.  The fact that I'm flying during different times might have a factor as different AI flights are scheduled during the day and maybe I'm just crashing on those days when there's a problem with an AI flightplan/schedule or type of aircraft in the air at that moment.

 

Best regards,

[Ray Proudfoot 9,025]

When I checked the FSX crash details via AppCrash this morning yesterday's crash was indeed a StackHash_7333 error. I wonder why that entry didn't show up yesterday.

 

Anyway, today I decided to have a look at Event Viewer and see if anything else was crashing. I had lots of srv crashes with the following description... The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the server reached the configured limit for nonpaged pool allocations.

 

I used the feature to find the solution and made a couple of registry changes. That crash has stopped.

 

After that I tried two long flights. LPFR-LSZH (Faro, Portugal to Zurich, Switzerland). Flight went fine with no hiccups at all. This afternoon I flew LSZH-ESSA (Zurich to Stockholm, Sweden). Again, perfect flight.

 

It's too early to make a connection between these events. But it's certainly encouraging. Tomorrow I shall try EGKK-LIPZ with the approach to the DIK waypoint my test for StackHash crashes.

 

What I would suggest to everyone is just because your PC appears to boot up okay it's no assurance that everything is okay with it. You have to examine all Errors and Warnings in Event Manager and correct them. I have no idea of the severity of the one above but it doesn't sound good. maybe it does affect memory and we know StackHash errors are memory related.

 

Has it stopped snowing there Jim?

[Jim Young 2,356]

 

 

Has it stopped snowing there Jim?

 

Yes, around 9 pm last night but the temps went down into the single digits so I had to watch for frozen pipes.  I had none.  It's going to stay in the teens for the rest of the week and maybe more snow tomorrow. 

 

Regarding your events... that's a good suggestion to watch those especially the critical errors.  This is why there's a long discussion in the AVSIM CTD Guide on how to check your Event Viewer for errors.  I currently have two but they are not serious and I'll eventually find a fix.

 

I did a couple more flights from KORD to KSTL without a StackHash or NTDLL.dll error.  That's three complete flights without a crash.  Disabling MyTrafficX fixed my problem (so far).  I have since uninstall MTX and will use the default.  I'm tired of StackHash/NTDLL crashes.  I like to enjoy this hobby.  I'm getting ready to try another flight from Wash Dulles to Charlotte NC.  I have gotten a lot of StackHash/NTDLL crashes on this route too. 

 

On all of my flights I have enabled Process Monitor and filter the program to just show FSX.exe.  I have been starting it just as I hit the runway for takeoff and turn it off after I shutdown FSX.  It has tons and tons of data.  Just one second is a massive amount of data.  But it shows me what's being loaded throughout the flight.  Most of the time just scenery but every so often I see large segments where it is going on the Internet and sending/receiving data (probably ASN).  I found one major anomaly.  Orbx/FTX Autogen scenery is loading as well as all of my FSX default Autogen.  I have turned Autogen off in the Fsx.cfg (I fly with photoscenery and Autogen is useless).  So, if you turn a switch off in FSX (like Autogen), it does not mean it will still not load.  Orbx/FTX Autogen is loading too but I do not have any Orbx/FTX scenery loaded in the Scenery Library.  I have nothing being loaded in the dll.xml relating to Orbx/FTX yet all of their Autogen is loading.  I'm in the middle of Illinois in the middle of the United States, far, far away from any Orbx/FTX scenery.  I don't own any of their stuff like FTX Global.  I did get rid of all of the MyTrafficX AI from loading and that has eliminated any stutters.  I don't get into those single digit FPS anymore.  I have the following loaded for each flight:

 

PMDG 737NGX

ASN

ProATC

FSDT KORD

SimMarket KSTL

MegaScenery Earth V2, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Kansas.

 

I had to disable all of my other FSDT airports as they were all being loaded too during the flights.  I suspect they think I might divert to Las Vegas, and Los Angeles along the way.

 

Waiting for my next StackHash.  Got to go find it.  Hope your StackHash was fixed.

 

Best regards,

[Ray Proudfoot 9,025]

Hi Jim,

 

Good to hear you haven't suffered too much with the snow and cold.

 

Interesting that you've had no crashes since disabling MTX. If that continues for another dozen flights then it does rather point the finger at a bad aircraft or aircraft texture. But finding it much be a nightmare.

 

I will continue with my current settings until such time as I get a crash. They seem more likely over NW Germany although I have had a couple west of Denver. I will concentrate with flights that are close to the DIK waypoint as that seems a hotspot.

 

Process Monitor is a powerful tool and I may look at that should a crash happen at a specific point. Fortunately as my flights always involve a plan and jet routes that are easily reproducible.

 

My fingers remain firmly crossed as do yours I'm sure.

[Jim Young 2,356]

The StackHash_7333 is a popular CTD (if you do a search here in this forum you will see many threads).  A lot of members are getting that memory error at memory address 7333.  What's the commonality?  Is it MTX 5.4c?  I don't think it's a texture or aircraft in MTX but a schedule.  Anyway the secret might be in what was updated from version 54b to 54c (if that truly is the cause).  I like MTX so I'm hoping it is not the cause but so far everything is pointing to it.

 

I did another successful flight from Charlotte North Carolina to Washington Dulles.  According to the fsuipc log I had an average of 40 fps (which really does not make much difference as a StackHash or ntdll.dll ctd's will happen in 300-400 milliseconds (the time for the eye to blink) with the fps not even registering it.

 

The high temp here today is 26 degrees F or -31 degrees C.  Last night it got down to 8 degrees F or -13 degrees C.  Cold! 

 

Best regards,

[Ray Proudfoot 9,025]

Hi Jim,

 

I've had some very encouraging news about this StackHash_7333 crash. I reported this problem on the MTX forum over a week ago and had no response for several days until Monday when someone else was able to replicate the crash and also eliminate it by setting Ai to zero.

 

Burkhard then responded asking for a particular texture file to be deleted as he couldn't open it via his normal method suggesting it was corrupted.

 

I'm descending into LIPZ having had the same crash earlier with Ai at 35 and even 10 on a reload. I got past DIK by setting Ai to zero.

 

I'll try this flight again later with that file disabled and hopefully it will fix the problem. My crashes are so infrequent around Europe but are concentrated in this DIK area. I hope it gives encouragement to others that they can be eliminated and as you suggest, are connected to MyTrafficX.

 

26F (-3C) is almost tropical! :wink: