Hi im trying to stack comet data, it registers successfully and starts stacking but the blue progress bar hasnt progressed in over 24 hours from what can be seen in the photograph
There is a bug.
Comet registration must take less than 1min.
You need to retry.
Thanks ive tried a few times now. Ive turned it all off so ill go back to it tomorrow fresh and see how it goes
I’m having a similar (the same?) problem.
Comet registration works as it should, but when I try to stack, it will often hang. I’ve gotten the full sets to stack, but I can’t seem to work out the exact mechanism to reproduce the success or failure. Sometimes I’ve been able to stack a subset of the frames with success, but I can’t reproduce it reliably either. I’ve gone so far as to save off copies of the .seq file after preprocessing, star registration, and comet registration, in the event normalisation data may be to blame, but so far no patterns have really emerged.
I do notice that the OP @Paul_Martin is also using Mac OS. This gives me an idea to spin up one of my old Linux boxes to see if the hanging is isolated to the Mac.
A friend of mine also reported problems on a Mac. I’ll ask for details.
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No problem with the same dataset on my (ancient) Linux box running the the same version of Siril. The “hanging during comet stacking” behaviour is on my M1 MacBook Air.
I don’t see why it would behave differently on macOS.
Very strange.
I think it is a resource/memory issue. We have an entry about that in our FAQ.
I have got to the bottom of the issue.
It is when changing the name of the output file to stop the previous stacked image of the star stack being overwritten. So instead of changing the name of the output file in siril. Just go into the output folder change the name of the previous stacked image/s there. And then leave the default stacked image name in siril for the comet stack so that there is no overwriting of files.
Worked a treat for me.
Now i just need to find out how to combine the star and comet images in photoshop so that theres no streaking stars as my best comet detail was using sigma hi/lo 3
@Paul_Martin I’m glad it worked out for you!
But unfortunately it doesn’t do the trick for me. Besides, I’ve been changing file names to make subset stacks to verify if there’s a threshold where the stack is successful, or one where it’ll fail (inconclusive - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t).
@lock042 Thanks for the tip, and I really appreciate the response!
I have run stacks of several hundred images for DSO successfully with this computer, it’s just with the comet stacking where I’ve had this hangup.
What I’ve done is a clean reboot of the machine, with no programs other than Siril and Activity Monitor running. I’ve also reduced the ratio of memory usage from 0.9 to 0.8 in the hopes of preventing Siril from “running over.”
Comet stacking still hangs.
Are there any other diagnostic steps / checks I could make?
Yes could you start Siril from the console.
/Applications/Siril.app/Contents/MacOS/Siril
and give me the output logs when using it from the start to the bug.
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Here are the output logs captured from the console using a > redirect.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8yjEwZQ8EvAjQTSUeDBe0io0H8BGWf0/view?usp=share_link
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-jG5pqPrnyumXPewzBZjOms9RXWn7bcW/view?usp=share_link
The first log contains the steps from comet registration to stacking, and the progress bar hanging for more than 10 minutes.
The second log is a retry of the stacking step, after closing firefox and restarting Siril.
Please let me know if there’s anything I should be doing differently to capture data. Thanks!
The freeze is a crash in fact.
But the logs give no information about it, so very difficult to help.
Hello, thank you for the detailed log file, I have to ask: how did you get a debug version of siril on mac, did you build it yourself?
It appears the detected amount of available memory is the same between the two runs, and in both cases slightly more than 4G. How much is installed on the computer?
Since the crash happens when stacking memory is allocated, my guess is that this amount is wrong and siril goes out of memory and is either killed by the OS or crashes. But then, why doesn’t it happen for any stack, just for comets? I don’t understand this. It would be really good to fix this for the next release if you can give us a bit more of your time for testing.
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I am happy to help however I can. I’ve been using Siril for the past few years, and it would be nice to “give back to the community.”
- I did not compile my own Siril build. I simply downloaded the latest version from the website.
- I have 8GB installed
- With this particular version of Siril on this machine, I have run stacks as large as over 400 images at 5200x3900px, 32-bit as per default.
I think you and @lock042 are probably both correct in your suspicion of a memory/resource issue.
- I notice that no matter what I assign for memory to Siril, it will “go over” this amount:
But I think I may have been able to reproduce a case where I can “unlock” things.
-
- register stars, stack stars as normal. register comet.
-
- stack comet → causes hang situation
-
- restart Siril and stack with MEDIAN stacking (will stack on stars even if comet registration has been performed)
-
- restack comet with AVG stacking → success (!! but why?)
Here is the log from Step 3 above: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pyh1yi7tjlN_Rz96XoHUkNfaMXXMZgDq/view?usp=share_link
Instead of MEDIAN stacking (with Additive with scaling normalisation – the same as my average stacking in the end), I’ve also tried SUM stacking and Pixel Min stacking, but the only one that seems to do the trick is MEDIAN. I have no idea why. This is the equivalent of standing on one’s head and singing while trying to troubleshoot. I just stumbled upon it trying to see if other stacking algorithms would hang up.
Please let me know what else I can do to help diagnose the bug.
In terms of memory usage when mine was hanging memory usage stopped at 3.6Gb but when it finally worked after allowing siril to use default file names the memory usage was able to increase much higher to get the stack done.
Definitely think it has a link to memory usage on a mac
Hello, I believe this is fixed in the development version, so for the upcoming release of 1.2 as well.
Thanks for the reports.
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This can be fixed in the current version by setting an absolute memory limit in the preferences by the way, to how many memory you can be sure to have available for Siril, see the activity monitor.
Merci bien!