Thread: RANT - LSP Scheduler Issues

LSP has again disappointed me for the third year running. Year one with V1 had no great expectations so no great issue, however for 2010 v1.7 was released, and as part of the beta team I continued to have high hopes that it could actually reach up and drive my very high channel count (VHCC) display, well it didn't make the cut. Despite all that many people used it with great success and i continued to promote it as the software for the future.
Enter 2011 - I dropped out of the community, leaving others to run forums and get on with it all and never planned to have even a single light up this year until mid-october and this was only due to people approaching the wife asking was the display going up.
Imagine my delight when I see LSP v2 had been released and you could have it licensed for 32k channels, now that boded well for my VHCC display at @ 8K channels. Now rather than just by stingy and buy a 8k license I figured that a 32k would be good.
Ended up only defining 7.2K channels (approx), imagine my delight when performance appling transitions was acceptable, i managed to get the upgrade before tripping over the 3 transition bug. it was all good. Couple days before turn on i had just started to run into issues when sequencing a song that was using a lot of transitions. Then we had a major rain/thunder storm and i had to pull down a bunch of pixels and repair over two days.
In the meantime i was running a basic 30 second animation on the display to check both that all controllers worked and all lights were responding, this was working and playing well.
Now imagine the horror when on Friday preparing for a test run that night I encountered the absolutely horrid scheduler requirement to import and optimise that took what felt like hours and one track even though the sequencer would open/edit and playback the file just caused the scheduler to lockup.... just wtf was going on... next scare i have already detailed and that's the pathetic 1st loop performance, when it seemed ok the next loop i figured ok lets see what happens tonight.
Now at this point all playback had occured during daylight..... enter the evening, scheduler kicks in and tracks begin to play, the intertrack delay was expected but was still annoying, the MISSING outputs though were just soul destroying, then guess what..... what.. scheduler just completely failed to play the last track even after a 10 minute delay.... ok let's reboot, oh f%&%^k scheduler is back into the first loop and errant track is still in playback list. Kill scheduler open sequencer grap one of the smaller songs and just set it to playback looped for the rest of the night. What a fiasco.
Spent saturday converting 2010 Vixen sequences into 2011 profiles and have used the venerable Vixen since.
Posted a query about the performance in the support section addressed my questions to Mike and David, full kudos to Mike for responding and thinking about the issues and a rather big thumbs down for David and his lack of response. Even if I was a complete newbie i think as a 32k license holder a quick "yep issues noted" would have showed some concern.
What I am NOT is a newbie, if i'm having performance issues then they are most likely real and at least deserve a response.

Since that first night of disaster i have upgraded to the current release..... that actually made the issue worse for me.

David: I don't expect a refund, i don't expect a magical cure this year, I am happy to accept that i have again pushed past LSP's abilities but I do expect some acknowledgement of the issues.
You have time to congratulate Eddy on a great show (and deserving it is) but your silence not only to me but to others experiencing scheduling issues is......... not sure what the word is......... but saddening comes to mind.

David: LSP remains to me a software tool that has a great sequencer (even if not intuative) that for a majority of people is the sequencer of choice but the way the scheduler functions, the fact you can't select already optimised sequences the scheduler has already saved, it's reported issues and now reading today a supposed requirement for audio files to be 128k mp3's even though the sequence scrubbing works best with WAV files. This makes a commercial product look and feel like a steaming pile of.......

I trust that development continues and I will continue to try to see if it can drive my display, depending on money channel predictions for 2012 are somewhere between 13k and 20k channels so i will continue to be on a leading edge.

The sooner LSP becomes a 64 bit app supporting multi-core processing the better it will be. Windows64 is becoming the norm just so vendors can sell you 8GB of RAM so it doesn't seem like a big deal to say "system requirements = Win64"

David: i'm not convinced I feel any better for this rant and could apply chunks of it to myself early in 2010 so if you have actually read this far with throwing me off the forum I continue to believe LSP can do it i just wish it had been this year.

Hi Phil,
I would have expected you to provide more constructive feedback given your lack of participation in the beta group this year.

People continue to push LSP to the limits, its customers are bleeding edge guys, as such LSP continues to be improved to meet the ever growing needs of the community.

Granted the scheduler has room for improvement, I can only test so many configurations and sequences this is why we test so much during the spring time to identify these sort of issues. Almost 90% of the common issues found by users are due to configuration, resources or pushing the physical limitations of the software. when the community supports its members, I have more time to design higher level solutions to trending issues. we litterally have taken software that was designed for 200 channels of incandescent lighting and made it scale to capabilities generating effects across thousands of rgb pixels, transitions, and layers... a ton of growth and capability... with some growing pains. (of course to be expected)

I like to think that because you are on the edge is why you are a member of the beta team, however this year we did not get to benefit from your contributions to the testing team due to taking a back seat.

Unfortunately, I cannot make systemc changes to LSP this late in the season without being disruptive to the stability and LSP customers.
I do investigate many issues and when possible provide hotfixes and revisions if I am able to without significant risk to stability.

Im not bringing specific customers into this discussion, but some people are growing into LSP's capability, some are fully leveraging its capabilities and others are pushing it beyond its limits because of what they expect it to do. it is what it is and I cannot live up to everyones expectations. I will however evolve, adjust and learn from the needs of the community...

Your feedback is noted, issues submitted or promoted to the project tracker will be reviewed and addressed through patches or architectual redesigns when off-season development resumes.

I look forward and hope you are available to contribute your feedback during the development period.

Regards,
David
LightShow Pro

Originally Posted by Aussiephil

now reading today a supposed requirement for audio files to be 128k mp3's even though the sequence scrubbing works best with WAV files.

Hi Phil,

I think you might have misread the post about MP3, the post was intended to provide the specs IF one is using MP3. It is not a requirement to use MP3 and lots of users are using WAV files in LSP. Sorry for the confusion.

Merry Christmas and good luck on a successful show.