Sharpcap May be incompatible with optane

[GSBass]

Hi Robin, just a heads up, was doing lunar imaging tonight and I think I ran in to the issue people complain about optane, after each shot completed I was faced with about 500 frames in the buffer that I was waiting for the write... it went pretty quick but consistently paused with 5 frames left, it would finish eventually but caused abnormal dropped frames.... it just hit me that optane was culprit so went in to settings and disabled it, after that captures were back to normal

[GSBass]

Btw, apparently it’s not something anyone will need to worry about going forward, Intel is axing optane, last consumer Intel drives end in February

[admin]

How weird! My suspicion is that SharpCap writes most of the frames and they end up going to the fast storage (optane) - eventually you get to a point where the data needs to be moved to the slower storage system and at that point the writing to disk basically seizes up until the slow system has caught up with all the previous writes.

I now exclusively run SSDs except for bulk storage –NVMe if supported by the motherboard, SATA if not.

Cheers, Robin

[GSBass]

Yeah your explanation is similar to what I thought might be going on, lucky we do have the option to just turn optane off, so it just acts as a regular ssd afterwards, it’s almost a mute point since the announcement Intel was going to discontinue but people should be aware , I did see someone say they didn’t have issues on the eaa side so this might mainly affect high frame rate captures

[GSBass]

just a update, apparently a wrong diagnosis to blame optane because the problem occured again last night while capturing moon with qhy462c, dropping frame rate and eventually the countdown of frame writing dialog with the hang of 5 frames to go, i do get the dialog box also saying sharpcap has quit responding and option to submit error report, I guess ill do that next time it happens, in the mean time i downloaded the sharpcap update and I am renabling optane since that was not culprit. it was below freezing both times this has happened so maybe cold is effecting my usb controller or something, its kinda odd, everything was capturing fine when i was capturing orion earlier in night, just went back out later to capture moon and got the errors again. anyway if i get this again ill make an effort to get you the logfile..... I did a search and it does seem you have addressed this error before over the years, definnitely a buffering/write thing but not sure why, new laptop,lots of ram, fast, zero delay writing files when working, just normal dialog pop up showing where it was saved

[admin]

Hi,

yes, definitely submit the bug report if you get prompted (and post here to let me know – including the version you are using as it helped me find the report quickly). There's nothing unusual about SharpCap being able to capture more quickly than the disc can handle, but even if that happens it shouldn't stop responding, so something odd is going on there. It would be good to track it down if possible

Cheers, Robin

[GSBass]

Hi, went out again tonight and took a ser of Mars, I did not get the bug report prompt but same behavior, it was capturing mars at 135fps, dropping frame like mad and then doing the countdown of saving frames til it reaches 5, I think it just finished a little faster is the reason I didn’t get the bug prompt, must be a timer for when the program stops responding, I guess I’ll try to do a fresh install but since i have both the 32bit and 64bit version and they both do this I doubt it will help. I did open up firecapture and it captured at 35fps which I think would have been more accurate on mars tonight because it’s so small and dim, I can’t seem to figure this out, I’ll still let you know if I get a bug report and send it but not expecting clear weather for a while