Dorico 4.0.10 Crashing -- Potential Memory Leak?

Warm greetings,

I looked through the forum for my specific issue but could not find another post about it; apologies if this is solved elsewhere!

Since upgrading to Dorico 4 and then updating to 4.0.10, my projects have been crashing after long work sessions. While investigating with the task manager, I noticed that all of my actions slowly add memory usage (300-500 MB per action), but the usage never goes down after I stop. Eventually, Dorico uses upwards of 12 GB of memory before it crashes. When I’m working with a larger project, I can reach the 96% memory usage within 30 minutes. No one set of reproducible actions causes the memory increase: simply inputting notes or moving from Write Mode to Engrave Mode causes it.

I have tried attaching the Dorico Diagnostics folder, but the forum says it is too large. Is there another way I can share it?

Thank you for the assistance! I’m loving the new features in Dorico 4, but the crashing has become very difficult to work with on tight deadlines.

All my best,
ZFC

Specs:
Windows 10 Pro
64-bit
16GB RAM

What VSTs are you using for playback? Also do you tend to have multiple projects open at once, or just one at a time?

Hi Richard,

I am using the HALion Sonic SE VST that comes with Dorico, and I only ever have one project open at a time.

Does the memory go up and up if you simply open and close the same project repeatedly, or is there more to it than that? We have had other reports of this sort of memory leak but we haven’t been able to reproduce the problem ourselves. There will be a certain amount of extra memory added over time as Dorico caches some of its data in case it needs to reuse it, but I wouldn’t expect it to get anywhere near 12GB.

Hello and welcome.
So 16 GB would not be enough for me.
I’m also on Windows 10/64 and the current version Dorico 4.01 behaves very, very well in terms of memory consumption and re-release as well as CPU and GPU utilization.
(I have 64 GB RAM)


Hallo und willkommen.
Also 16 GB wäre mir zu wenig.
Ich bin auch auf Windows 10/64 und die aktuelle Version Dorico 4.01 verhält sich in Bezug auf Arbeitspeicherverbrauch und wieder Freigabe sowie CPU und GPU Beanspruchung sehr, sehr erfreulich.
(Ich habe 64 GB Arbeitsspeicher)

Hi, I have my Dorico set that when I close a project, it closes Dorico completely, so closing and reopening resets the memory usage back to normal (2-3GB).

I have a diagnostic folder with 4 crash reports which is 18MB, over the limit of 4 provided for this forum. Perhaps I could send that to you directly, or I will keep working and if it crashes again, I will make a new diagnostic folder with hopefully a small enough file size to upload.

Paying more attention this morning, I found that playback actually caused the memory usage to go down a little bit, or at least stabilize. Also, it was always note input, switching between modes, and using keyboard shortcuts Alt+arrow keys (in both write mode and engrave mode) which caused the most memory usage increases.

If Dorico is crashing because it’s out of memory then the crash logs won’t tell me very much. The question is how it’s consuming so much memory - I don’t see the same issue. For example, if I start up Dorico and then open a moderate-sized score using HSO+HSSE sounds, the memory usage is around 2.9GB. If I then do Select All and Repeat to copy and paste the entire score (so it’s twice as long), the memory only goes up by about 200MB. In other words, for me, most of the memory usage is the sound samples rather than the notes, so I wonder how you are getting to such a high memory usage. How big is your project?

Ah, I understand. Thank you for that clarification.

It is certainly a large project: 19 flows, 220 pages, with 19 players (1 player to an instrument). However, I am now realizing that I have many more instruments loaded in my VST than I should because of early attempts at different orchestrations. Let me reset my playback template and see if the issue goes away.

Hello again,

Something interesting just happened. With resetting the playback template, the memory usage went down significantly and stayed down (between 2 and 3GB). However, when I went into Engrave Mode and used Alt+Arrow Keys to move around dynamics as a test, Dorico crashed immediately while only using 2 GB of memory at the time. Let me know if I can provide you with anything regarding that.

OK, so it looks like the unused VST instrument slots were what was using up all the memory - that makes sense.

The Engrave mode crash is probably unrelated, but if it’s reproducible - if there is a particular sequence of edits that will make it crash with a specific score - by all means send me the project and we can take a look. My email address is r dot lanyon at steinberg dot de.

Thank you so much for your time and patience. I’ll contact you directly.