BUG: Freezing and Crashing Games

[Wh1ppet]

Alright.. Quite a while back, probably over a year ago, I said that Display Fusion running on my system was doing something to hog all my resources and causing games to freeze and even outright crash. I got the typical claims that others have never experienced this problem and have continued to play with the issues on and off, ever since, with no real evidence to back up my claims that it is Display Fusion causing the problems, until now.

A few months back I invested in Process Lasso Pro to try to control issues with programs doing what I claim Display Fusion is doing. I locked almost all programs I have to Cores 0 through 2, including all the windows processes that aren't required to run across all cores, and I use cores 3 through 7 for games. I also intentionally turned down the priorities of programs that are suspected of causing lag issues, including Display Fusion.... Well, I have now spotted the pattern in Process Lasso's logs and it is definitely Display Fusion causing a good portion of my graphical stutter, lag and crashing issues in my game and this is how it plays out.

At the point the games are starting to stutter like they are having graphic issues, Display Fusion is trying to grab as much resources as it can and even with Process Lasso trying to claimp down on it and limit it's activity, it causes a 50% drop in the overall responsiveness of everything on the system and reduces graphics in games to between 4 FPS to absolutely frozen. Then the graphics will recover after a few secionds but only for a few seconds, because it's going to repeat when Diisplay Fusion launches DisplayFusionSettings.exe and it tries again to grab every bit of resources it can and Process Lasso tries to claimp down on both it and DisplayFusion.;exe to limit both of their access but they both drop all the system's responsiiveness by 75% for anywhere from 3 seconds to a full minute and if it's longer than 3 to 5 seconds, the games graphics completely freeze up and then promptly crash, then a few seconds later, DisplayFusionSettings.exe shuts down and a few seconds after that Process Lasso reports that DisplayFusion has stopped affecting system stability and it stops (trying at) throttling it.

[Wh1ppet]

Update:

Digging further into system logs I find that Display Fusion is making system calls about once every 2.5 seconds. It is the 3rd most active program on my system in the total number of resource calls it makes over the whole time it was running, with only Chrome and Steam being more active, and it has the second highest number of times it has had to be 'restrained' for excessive resource demands, with only Chrome being restrained more, but unlike Display Fusion, Chrome doesn't mess everything else up when it gets disciplined.

Previously, I'd said that it was occasionally spiking the CPU usage to unreasonably high levels. Well, I can prove it now, and have seen it do a lot more than just be the occasional resource hog.


What's more, I have looked up what DisplayFusionSettings supposedly does and the only info I can find on it's function is to access the download sources to find more wallpaper for desktops set up as slideshows and if this is the case, it should NEVER be running on my system for any reason because I don't have a slideshow going.. I have a completely static desktop using a local image for the wallpaper.... so I have no idea what your program has been doing that requires so much resources or why it's even running it's settings executable, but it won't be doing it anymore because I have uninstalled Display Fusion and will no longer be using it until I know that whatever is causing this issue has been addressed and fixed and that running it is not going to cause games to constantly stutter and crash on my system.

[Keith Lammers (Binary Fortress)]

You're correct about DisplayFusionSettings.exe. The only times it should be starting up is either when the random wallpaper changer needs to load a new image, or when you actually open the Wallpaper, Settings, or Monitor Config window. So there's definitely something weird going on there.

Is there any chance you could install DisplayFusion again, and send me a debug log captured while the constant launch/exits of DisplayFusionSettings.exe are happening?

If so, here are the debug logging steps:

• On the DisplayFusion Settings > Troubleshooting tab, change the Logging drop-down to "L1: Log Minimal" and click Apply
  
• Reproduce the issue and note the time so we'll know where to check in the log file
  
• Send us the DisplayFusion.log and DebugInfo.html files using the Help > Support Request button in the Settings window
  
• Disable debug logging after sending the log