MH replied to the topic 'Kstars crashes' in the forum. 2 years ago

I was running this version as well, it still crashed aplenty (may or may not be related).

My particular problem was almost certainly two things in conjunction:

  • Much larger camera files (new camera)
  • Astroberry most people get is a 32-bit OS (and may not even have a 64-bit OS)

The only thing I can guess for me due to the errors I saw while attaching gdb to the Kstars process thread and running until it died was that there were memory allocation errors due to the size of the RAM buffer available - so it would attempt to allocate the RAM necessary to hold the image in the viewer(s) and would have a Very Bad Time. Running completely without the EKOS summary viewer and FITS viewer was fine, but not being able to see your resultant images isn't ideal. Running Kstars to connect to the Pi remotely was okay (disabling the viewers on the Pi side, but leaving enabled on the remote host side), but there are latency issues with those large images that can cause weird hangs as well, though you then happily offload the image rendering to the remote host for the viewer(s) versus the Pi handling that lift.

What I ended up doing was actually shelling out for Stellarmate (both for the fact that it has support staff as well as offering a 64-bit version of the OS) and have had absolutely zero crash problems since then. The memory allocation pattern for the viewer also looks way more reasonable and doesn't have large spikes while rendering the images, as though Kstars has pre-allocated a RAM buffer to use versus "just-in-time" allocation.

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