RawTherapee Keeps Crashing

A little info on my equipment:
DELL Optiplex 780m mini-tower
3.33 Ghz processor
8-GB RAM
nvidia GEForce GT 730 2GB GDDR5 graphics card

Randomly, when I click “okay” in the SAVE dialogue, the progress bar will say “demosaicing” for a bit while the little green bar progresses; then, the screen will go white and my only option is to click “close program” in the box that pops up.

In about 1/3 of these occurences, my image will manage to get saved; saving as jpegs, for what it’s worth.

There is no rhyme nor reason as to when this occurs; I might manage to do ten images with nary a hitch, then it will crash on the next three.

I thought closing all other programs would help, but it seems to make no difference.

Do I have an equipment problem or do I have a RawTherapee problem ?

RawTherapee version 4.2.1005

How do I fix ?

Thanks for reading.

  1. What OS are you on?
  2. Does it at least consistently crash on the same images?

Have you tried an updated version? 4.2.1148 is out.

  1. Windows 7 Pro

  2. It is completely random as to when it crashes.

When I download this newer version 4.2.1148, must I first uninstall 4.2.1005; or, will it install as a separate program or override the old ?

Thanks.

I’m not 100% sure, but am just gathering some more information to help narrow down the possibilities. I think a new RT install will install over the old one, but I’m not 100% sure (I’ve never actually checked, just ran with it).

It’s worth trying the latest version, though, as they’re updating and improving things at a rapid rate. :slight_smile:

Since the current installation has problems, I would uninstall it first, an then (re)move all the stuff in the AppData directory. It is easy to reconfigure the settings after a re-installation.

Please explain this AppData directory business.

I have uninstalled programs before, but have never messed with any AppData directory.

Thanks.

@BuckSkin delete your cache, and file a proper bug report with a stack backtrace if it happens again:
http://rawpedia.rawtherapee.com/How_to_write_useful_bug_reports

Thanks !
I almost never found the cache folders; but, when I did, I emptied all of them.

Each folder had some 170 files within and I have hardly used RawTherapee as I am still just getting started.

I wish I had made some sort of short-cut to them for next time.

I have not yet tested to see if that fixed my problem; hopefully, it will; I will get back with my findings when I see how it goes.

Thanks for the information.

I have accessed the RawTherapee cache folders a second time and found a couple hundred files in each of them again.

It seems that emptying these folders does help to prevent RawTherapee crashing when I save my work.

I am new to all of this and have a couple questions about these cache folders.

Is there a down side to me deleting everything from the cache folders ?

With the least bit of image editing, there will be a ton of stuff in the cache folders; if I did not empty these folders, would that stuff just keep accumulating until it overflowed the hard-drive ?

Thanks for reading.

Nope. Things/files/edits are placed in a cache to use them the next time a bit faster, without decoding things again or downloading things again. Deleting cache folders makes you wait the next time you open a folder a second or two or 30 (depends the app) or so.

As I wrote in that other thread - my first questions would be:

Which Virus defender do you use and is it configured all drives or the other way: do you have more then just drive C: and if yes does the virus defender instect all of them?

So, if you have only drive C: and the virus defender is watching it - can you attach an external drive and configure your virus defender not to watch this? If yes, try this.

It may sound strange, but from what I’ve learned after several years building up dispatch systems running on windows in most cases if we encouter a freeze it was something with virus defenders.

I don’t know how RT is writing files to the disk but if an application on windows is opening a file on a disk which is watched by a virus defender it can come to a situation that the virus defender is inspecting the same file the app at that moment wants to write the defender is blocking the app. As having two apps opening the same file at the same moment has to be supported by both apps.

Sorry for me being computer illiterate.

You make a good point, to which that I do not readily know the answer.

I write the majority of my image files onto an external hard-drive; 1-TB Transcend.

I do know that I myself have not as yet installed any antivirus program, as I have been sort of holding off until I was more knowledgeable on the subject before I did something dumb; I do have Microsoft Security Essentials, but I am not sure just what it does.

If it were the case that a virus defender is conflicting with RT trying to write files, would not it also do the same with my other image programs ?; RT is the only one that has the problem.

I do appreciate your input and it does sound logical that something like that could be going on; I will educate myself better on the situation and see if that just may be the culprit.

Thanks so much.

There is nothing to be sorry about @BuckSkin we all started once :slight_smile:

so if you are already writing to an external drive well most probably it’s not the virus defender, not sure, but there is a good chance it is not.

but then you have those options of problems:

But keep in mind it’s a bit of guesswork I’m doing here, so dont just grab that hotfix - so first:

So are those freezes do happen only when writing to that external drive? If yes, how about writing to the internal one?

I’m sorry but there are a many possibilities why this can happen - well in the end it could be RT too, but if it were, there would be more reported errors like yours - well I would guess

Have you looked into the windows events after such a freeze?
look here how to open It would be the Application (program) events where you could find some info

Thanks; I will check out those suggestions.

A bit more info:
I had the intermittent crash problem when I was writing files to the C: drive/My Pictures as well.

When RT freezes up and quits responding, once the little window pops up telling me the program has quit responding and gives me an option to close the program, I click “close the program”, RT then instantly disappears/closes and all other programs are good to go, so it is just RT that is freezing and not the system.

I have found that the crashes are not nearly so frequent when I make it a point to empty the cache folders prior to each use.

Also, another thing I have noticed, the crashes are not nearly so frequent when I open RT from the task-bar icon and load from the browser, rather than sending an image to RT from FastStone or some other program; however, it is much quicker and more convenient to send images from FastStone when it does not crash.

Thanks.

in that case there is a chance to find some more info in windows events, most probably an error related to RT or a so called “application hang”

well in your case most probably all in english then - so it would “Error” instead of “Fehler”, sorry my win10 here is configured in german.

inside the “detail” tab you should find some more info, like this

and with EventID and Keyword you can start and search the web for that error.

Now that looks like something that just may get to the root of the problem; I will check that out.

Thanks !

Yes, two:

  1. Every time you enter a folder which you’ve already been in, RawTherapee will take some time to re-generate the thumbnails because you deleted the cache folder.
  2. If you set RawTherapee to not store processing profiles alongside their image counterparts, that means the only place where they would be stored is the cache. Then if you delete the cache, you would lose those processing profiles. For this reason, that is not the default behavior — RawTherapee by default stores processing profiles alongside their image counterparts.

Furthermore, there is no need to delete the cache often. It would be wrong to assume that each crash or freeze happens because of some problematic cached file. Each crash must be examined to determined why it happened, only then can it be fixed. Should the crash be caused by a problematic cached file, the important thing would be to identify which file, and send it to us, so that we can fix the cause.

That could happen, but that is why Preferences > File Browser > Cache Options exists.

Thanks for explaining.

I apologize for my abundant ignorance of such things, but I am becoming less ignorant with each question asked and answered.

These extras I see in my image folders, I guess they are the “profiles” you speak of; what purpose do they serve ?

As little as I know about this program, it is a wonderful asset to my image editing endeavors and I thank everyone responsible for making it available.

No apologies necessary @BuckSkin, we are here to help!

I’m guessing you a talking about the *.pp3 files, right? Well those are the files where all the settings you did while working with the image inside RT RT stores those settings. Sometime those are also called side car files. Those are plain text files, you can have a look open them in notepad.