Proclaim Stops working Same time each Sunday

Harry Maben
Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

Hello,

We are having issues with Proclaim stopping just before our first service. The screen goes gray and you need to restart. This happens about 8:45 to  9:00 AM each Sunday. It will do this once may be twice then it will be fine. We have no issue at any of the other services or during the week. We are running Windows 7, the PC is a i7 with 8 gigs so I can't see that it is a hardware issue. I checked obvious things like Windows and Norton updates, they are all set to manual. Once the presentation is loaded is there anything else Proclaim is dependent on? Does it somehow communicate with Logos? This almost seems like some type of capacity issue? Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Harry 

Comments

  • Scott Alexander
    Scott Alexander Member, Logos Employee Posts: 3,816

    The screen goes gray and you need to restart.

    What part of the screen goes gray? The entire screen? just to the Proclaim application? just the slides output window? When the screen goes gray is the application responsive or hung?

    It will do this once may be twice then it will be fine.

    Do you restart Proclaim? Restart the computer?

    Once the presentation is loaded is there anything else Proclaim is dependent on? Does it somehow communicate with Logos?

    Proclaim talks to Logos servers in order to support features like signals and the Proclaim remote. If it's unable to communicate with our servers those connectivity dependent features should be the only thing that stops working. 

    This is the first I've heard of a gray screen issue and I'm very interested in getting to the bottom of it. 

  • Stephen Challen
    Stephen Challen Member Posts: 64 ✭✭

    Can I ask if you have a screen saver still turned on?  Also have you checked your power saving options to ensure that the screen is not to switch off after lack of usage?

    I just am wondering if a power saving issue is causing an issue, and that it is crashing instead of coming out of sleep or hibernation mode.  As I say just a though to consider.  The idea behind it is that I for one tend to leave the computer on Sunday's alone for much longer between setting up and starting then I do for a midweek meeting.  I had a strange issue around this myself and hence I turned off power saving within a "presentation" user which I then use for services rather than the standard login for normal work.

  • Stephen Challen
    Stephen Challen Member Posts: 64 ✭✭

    My other thought was if time is a key factor and communication with the Logos server can you confirm which time zone you are in?

    I have found early on Sunday's I get an odd issue or two on Proclaim which I wondered due to my time zone could be a server process running in the middle of the night but affects me during the day.  I don't know what the Proclaim Servers do of course if anything during the night, and may be a red herring of an idea.

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Scott,

    Thank you for your reply! Unfortunately am normally in the Praise Band so I have never actually seen the issue. The information I have is from interviews only.  We can not seem to duplicate at any other time. What was explained is is that there are functions, that are grayed out.  lt sounded to me like you would expect to see with a permisson issue. So you can see it, you just can't click on it. and the program hangs. The team restarts the PC, but I am not sure if they need to. I will be there this morning to try to see it for myself. 

    My original thought was that Proclaim was some sort of hybrid SaaS and we were losing connectivity or  encountering latency given we start at 9:00 AM EST ( East Coast ) and I would think demand would be high then. 

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Sorry, replying to the wrong post!

    Scott,

    Thank you for your reply! Unfortunately am normally in the Praise Band so I have never actually seen the issue. The information I have is from interviews only.  We can not seem to duplicate at any other time. What was explained is is that there are functions, that are grayed out.  lt sounded to me like you would expect to see with a permisson issue. So you can see it, you just can't click on it. and the program hangs. The team restarts the PC, but I am not sure if they need to. I will be there this morning to try to see it for myself. 

    My original thought was that Proclaim was some sort of hybrid SaaS and we were losing connectivity or  encountering latency given we start at 9:00 AM EST ( East Coast ) and I would think demand would be high then. 

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Stephan,

    Sorry I replied to the wrong post. We are on the East Cost, EST. I am going to check the power and screen saver setting and will get back to you. 

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Stephen,

    Thank you for the tip! I checked the screen saver it is set to none, and power saver is off. I think we already had that issue!

    Harry

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Scott,

    Of course there were no problems Sunday!  That said in investigating further we now feel there were actually two different issues. The first was Proclaim graying out and locking, meaning listed as “not responding” in Task Manager. The second was that the program just shut down. For both issues the fix was to restart Proclaim.

     

    We think that we have identified the issue with the gray screen. We are a Parish with three Churches that share Pastors. All the content is the same for each church. We think this had to do with an incorrect loading of a video. We keep the videos on each local computer. What has happened in the past is that one person would copy and paste the lineup for all the churches. Every once in awhile it would include a video that one of local computers didn't have. So if you don't catch it, freezes things up (confuses the comp). Not sure if that makes sense but it seems that both times we saw the gray screen this was the case. If this seems feasible I would disregard this symptom.

     

    This still leaves us with the issue of Proclaim just shutting down which has happened at least three consecutive Sundays. This again happens only between 8:30 and 9:00 AM Sunday, and when no one is touching the PC. So we are set up ready to go waiting for the service to start and it just drops. As I mention it did not happen this Sunday. The only thing that we see different is that there were no announcements that had "signals" attached this Sunday. I know this is not much to go on, and you said it we lost connectivity with your servers the signals piece would stop, but it should not bring down the program. At this point I think we just need to wait and see the next time we use signals.  I will keep you posted. One question, it appears based on other posts that the Proclaim error logs reset each time the program is started? Is that correct? So you need to pull the logs right after the error? Can you provide details on where the file sits?

     

    Thanks

    Harry

  • Scott Alexander
    Scott Alexander Member, Logos Employee Posts: 3,816

    This still leaves us with the issue of Proclaim just shutting down which has happened at least three consecutive Sundays. This again happens only between 8:30 and 9:00 AM Sunday, and when no one is touching the PC. So we are set up ready to go waiting for the service to start and it just drops. As I mention it did not happen this Sunday. The only thing that we see different is that there were no announcements that had "signals" attached this Sunday. I know this is not much to go on, and you said it we lost connectivity with your servers the signals piece would stop, but it should not bring down the program. At this point I think we just need to wait and see the next time we use signals.  I will keep you posted. One question, it appears based on other posts that the Proclaim error logs reset each time the program is started? Is that correct? So you need to pull the logs right after the error? Can you provide details on where the file sits?

    I can see a crash from your group in our automatic error reporting database which indicates the application has run out of memory. This is likely related to a memory leak in the video driver and will be exacerbated by playing videos. Do you by chance have a video in the pre-service loop when the crashes occur?

    First thing to check is that your system is up to date with Windows Update. Second I would go to the driver manufacturer site and see if they have any additional updates available. Once you're sure the machine is up to date try letting Proclaim run in a loop with a video or tow. You'll be able to watch memory usage creep up in task manager if it's still leaking.

    If the issue persists the last workaround we have is to disable hardware acceleration which usually works around the driver issue. Instructions for how to do so here - https://community.logos.com/forums/t/91925.aspx

  • Harry Maben
    Harry Maben Member Posts: 7 ✭✭

    Scott,

     

    So we may be on to something.  We had the issue of Proclaim just shutting down again Sunday. It happen right as we got to an announcement that had "signals" attached. We restarted Proclaim and things were fine. What is interesting is it again only happens just before 9:00AM and 9:30 AM Sunday.  We ran the same service at 11:00 AM and no issues. We also ran the same Saturday and no issues. I can certainly check for a memory leak but it would think if that was the issue it would happen all the time correct? 

    Thanks,

    Harry