Experiment crashing (sometimes) without error code - Pavlovia

Hi Julia,

Thanks for adding to the thread! Sorry to hear its crashing for you too.

I posted the question again on this post: Pavlovia: black screen and unable to continue (RAM issues) and we managed to come to an answer.

I made the task a bit too fancy and it wasn’t able to run. I have a lot of code running each frame as I highlighted elements that participants hovered over to make it more interactive. Removing a lot of the ‘every frame’ code managed to fix it (mostly). It now crashes about 1/40 times compared to 1/2. I’ve also found before a large number of trials can also cause issues (could split into 2 parts if possible)

Thinking back, I suppose a lot of people we pilot on are friends/colleagues with relatively powerful hardware (we also create the tasks on good machines). Sending my task into the public, most of the crashes occurred on relatively older laptops.

I’m not aware of any minimum specs although it would be very useful! Anecdotally around 4GB of ram (Windows) tended to be good for my task. It’s not something I thought of at all. PsychoPy tasks don’t appear very intensive so perhaps the issue is with how Pavlovia handles/optimises the RAM (pure speculation).

Despite the changes, my task always hated Macs. I think they have different security protocols making it difficult. My videos never played on Macs and participants couldn’t respond using the mouse. I now only run it on Windows and Chrome.

Hope it helps!

Chris

1 Like