[Bug] Runtime error after fullscreen mode

Michif

How to reproduce:
If you run my experiment in full screen, let it crash by pressing ESC and then rerun it the runtime error occurs. Apparently it only crashes if you let at least one whole trial run (maybe a couple of more). And sometimes you need to run it in fullscreen window more than twice.

Weirdly enough, if I run the experiment in windowed mode no problem at all occurs.

Maybe worth to know: I am using two screens and the experiment and OpenSesame run on the main screen which is on high def resolution.



You can access my experiment via the link below. So you can try to rerun it. I have a runtime error with the most recent version as well as the most recent dev version. https://www.dropbox.com/s/q4rxtf0zqka6y6q/RuntimeExperiment3.opensesame.tar.gz

EDIT:

I just figured out that it sometimes just doesn’t show the gabor gratings in the second fullscreen run without producing an error. But after a while or after I press esc and want to keep on working it crashes with a memory error.

EDIT2:

Also it has nothing to do with the gabor frequency (in my experiment it is above 1). I just tried it out with several values below and incl. 1 and it still crashes.

Edwin

On this note: I've noticed that OpenSesame usually crashes when an experiment that uses an excessive amount of pre-prepared canvasses is run in succession. When you run it for the first time, no problem occurs. Run it twice and a runtime error occurs. Run it once, restart OpenSesame and run it again and everything works fine.

Problem occurs when run from source, on both win7 and winXP.

(and so, maybe the above error is a memory thing as well, since the runtime error and the phrases "Apparently it only crashes if you let at least one whole trial run (maybe a couple of more). And sometimes you need to run it in fullscreen window more than twice" seems very familiar!)

Michif

Yeah, actually if I just close OpenSesame (willingly) after each fullscreen run it also works every time.

sebastiaan

Hi guys,

Yes, this is an annoying and persistent issue that occurs on some systems. It is not a bug in OpenSesame per se, but a memory leak in one of the underlying libraries (PyGame, PyOpenGL, or something like that). I don't know what causes it, and I can't offer a real fix, although Florian has implemented something in Expyriment that should work around this. In other words, if you switch to the xpyriment back-end, the problem should disappear (and if not, let me know).

Alternatively, you can use opensesamerun to run your experiment. This way OpenSesame doesn't execute the experiment in the same process, but starts a new program to do this. You can enable this option under Preferences → Run options → Run experiments in a separate process.

Cheers,
Sebastiaan