Waterfall Freezes

zl1cezl1ce
in Problems and Issues

Hi all,

I like to leave my Kiwi running, often monitoring WSPR or FT8.

After a while the waterfall freezes and the audio output stops. Pressing F5 to reload the page restarts it again (but I have to select the extension again).

I have 2 channels on autorun and these are not affected as far as I can tell from pskreporter. (This has been happening for months and was the same before I added the 2 autorun channels)

Last night I was monitoring FT8 on 15m and the waterfall froze after 45 minutes, after a restart, it froze again after about the same length of time, but often it is a lot shorter period e.g 10 to 15 minutes.

I have the same issue if I am using an online public Kiwi.

My computer is Windows 11 but I had the same issue with windows 10

Browser: Chrome (but I think the same is happening with Brave)

Any suggestions on how to fix this please?

Thanks

Graham

zl1ce

Comments

  • jksjks

    I'd be interested to know if Firefox works any better for you or not. I don't use Chrome that much but I'll try some tests here.

  • jksjks

    I ran a bunch of tests and essentially didn't see any problems.

    I used a Kiwi on the other side of the world from me to add a fair bit of Internet latency and uncertainty to the test. I ran a WSPR in Firefox and FT8 on Chrome (both in extension mode, not autorun). They ran fine for 9.5 hours. I looked at the Chrome memory use and Javascript wasn't leaking memory or anything.

    So my best guess is that this is just your Internet connection stalling or something causing the connection to drop. Have you got Starlink or rural/local WiFi in the network path? Or something else that might be marginal?

  • zl1cezl1ce

    Thanks for looking into this.

    I have a fibre connection with 300M+ download speed although I don't think internet speed would be an issue as it happens with my local network connection as well as connecting to remote Kiwis

    I don't have Firefox but ran Brave last night and it froze as well

    As far as I know the 2 autorun (FT8) channels work continuously so it looks as though it must be an issue in my computer that is causing it.

    I will try another old computer that I have in my workshop to see if it is the same

  • zl1cezl1ce

    I may have accidentally stumbled on the cause but not the fix

    After running my Kiwi extensively on FT8 for the past few days, if I have the audio muted with the speaker gadget, the freezing problem occurs

    image.png

    With the audio unmuted I can usually run the Kiwi for 10 hours or more before it freezes - more than acceptable as I wouldn't normally use it for this long.

    image.png

    I haven't tried the same thing on public receivers yet but that will be my next step

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