Hi All
I have an Obsession II SPS with what I believe might be memory issues that are showing themselves in two areas.
A little background on the system: the processor lives in the dimmer room, not by the faceplate, and is not accessible (or not without a bit of "effort") by the students here. The console is rarely shut down. This has not been a problem until recently, although ever since the system was installed in 2002, the console would crash if it wasn't used for a few weeks. It didn't used to be a problem. Reboot of the system took about 3-4 minutes and away we'd go.
The first problem:
Recently, however, boot times are all over the map, sometimes taking as long as 20 minutes to reboot. I called Tech Support about this issue. I had assumed that due to a couple recent power outages that the system had been corrupted by the sudden shutdown. Then it happened without a power loss. The message logging is enabled, and at one point got to be quite high, topping 500k in size. The tech (don't remember his name) said to clear that out as the system doesn't like large chunks of memory used like that. I cleared the log as directed. The boot was somewhat faster, but not markedly so. Fast forward a few months. The console had crashed a couple of times, again after not being used for some time. Thankfully, up to this point the thing hasn't crashed during a show (knocking wood). When I rebooted the system, the message log was a smallish 48-50k, but the last line was a stream of random characters and then looped back to the beginning. I cleared out the log and went on with my life as usual. The last time I booted the machine, a student had shutdown the system. I was expecting a long reboot, but noooo.... it booted in a chipper 3-4 minutes. I'm starting to think it's possessed at this point.
The second problem:
Lately saves to disk are taking an extremely long time. This afternoon I saved a show with a patch, 2 moving lights patched, and 4 dummy cues and it took 4 minutes to write to the hard drive. Now I *know* this isn't a full drive even though there is the final version of every show file since the system was installed. The 40GB disk that's in the machine should be able to hold hundreds of thousands of show files based on the size of the average file.
I'm concerned that since this is an DOS based platform and that the hard drive hasn't been formatted in about 7 years that it could stand a defrag, maybe? That might answer both of my problems. Then again, I might be way off base. Our road house has a Dual Processor system that they rarely shut down, and it works fine. It's only about a year younger than my system.
I bow to the collective wisdom of the ETC Forum. Perhaps someone can shed some light on this and/or offer suggestions. In the mean time, I am going to start regularly shutting the system down and rebooting. It seems to like that.
Thanks!
....Ron
