New to this forum and to the whole K-Stars and Ekos thing. I have also been experiencing this memory leak problem; I screen recorded my session this evening and have posted a link here if anyone is interested. K-Stars crashed at 1:14:23 in this clip. I has the FITS viewer disabled in K-Stars. I am running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM and Astroberry.

www.dropbox.com/s/anp7k2o25f0jovh/ice_vi...201-181546.webm?dl=0

Jim

There is not file that is accessible. Can you please repost?
I also have these repeated and absolutely unpredictable crashes, but only on my Pi4. Never on my mini-PC, so I suspect this is something inherent to the Pi4 firmware or the architecture.

For another data point, I don't see the problem with simulation at all. I ran last night with real hardware (SM OS, Pi4-4GB, ASI183mc Pro, ASI290mm Mini) and saw a crash every time I ran any sequence containing multiple image captures. I do get a single fits preview (haven't turned that off yet). However, when I ran with only 1 capture at a time (no matter how many times I ran a single capture), it always worked fine. I ran out of time last night during my tests, but I was curious about whether a zero delay between image captures could be aggravating the situation. I upgraded to 3.4 today, and I'll try again tonight to capture some additional data and post here on whether this is better in the new release.

A few observations that might help with this:
1) I think you hit an important point with the 'exposure delay' . Adding 5 s between exposures has reduced crashes for me.
2) I have FAR fewer crashes (but not 0) when I run the Pi4 from an SSD with Swap enabled instead of from an SD card. The SD card is S-L-O-W and probably aggravates the data congestion the Pi4 can't handle.
3) FITS viewer on or off makes no difference for me.

When you say crashes, do you mean memory leak (running out of memory) crashes, or any crashes (eg. standard memory corruption), or is it hard to tell?

So, is you're suspicion that it has to do with the saving of the file?

Are you talking about a fits camera, or a DSLR? A mono camera or an RGB camera?

Hy

With 'crash' I mean Kstars quitting abruptly without any warning and the screen reverting to the Desktop. The few times I saw it happen, I did not see the memory maxing out. I have posted a few logs here before and the logs are interesting inasmuch the log is literally cut off in mid-sentence, even mid-word. The logger was writing normally, no warning and then - finito. Happened to me with DSLR, OSC and monochrome cameras.
I can't recognize a pattern. In fact, the same setup, no change in hardware or software updates, would run flawlessly through the night yesterday and record 500 frames, only to crash after 100 frames today.
And that only happens on the Pi4, my mini-PC (also with only 4GB RAM) runs just fine through the night.
Definitely Pi4 specific.

I'm using an OSC ASI183mc Pro. The crash drops at least the hotspot, and I think more because when the VNC connection retry succeeds, KStars and Ekos are completely gone and need to be restarted. I do have my suspicions about the file save....that's what led me to wonder about inserting a delay. The camera produces 40MB files. So, I will add a delay and see if I can reduce this as El Corazon suggests....

I'm not using hotspot mode, my Pi4 is connected to my home WiFi and VNC is NOT dropped when this occurs.
But I concur with the rest of your description: Kstars and Ekos windows are gone, only the desktop is visible.
I have not extended the delay beyond 5s, perhaps that increases stability further? I am using the 183MM Pro, so basically same camera, same file size. Also happens with the ASI1600MM, which writes slightly smaller files (32 MB).

Sorry; posted it on YouTube instead:

From tests tonight, I wasn't able to reproduce last night's consistent failures. This was after applying the new release. I now seem able to take large sets of 40Mb subs without any delay and the SW doesn't crumble. I didn't do an extreme exhaustive test, but this release does seem more stable than the prior release for these large format ASI cams. I had lots of other issues (my own equip), but the SW was good tonight. Let's hope it's a good sign!

Don't hold your breath just yet. I have never had the failures you describe, not being able to string more than a single exposure together, but I have had crashes after 50, 100 or even 300 perfectly captured frames. There does not seem to be a rhyme or reason to it. It just happens as in Stargazer's video (previous post). All is well and from one split second to the next, Kstars has crashed. It has nothing to do with the release. I have had that ever since I started using the Pi4.
I wish there were a clear path to figuring out what the problem is.

Well, at this point, it's great to see improvement, and if I get to 50-100-300 subs captured regularly, I'll be happy. The silver lining is that I've learned it's actually pretty quick/easy to recover. I do concur on experiencing spurious/perplexing issues with the Pi4. I don't see a simple blame on "power issues". I see these odd reboot sequences sometimes even when I've disconnected pretty much everything from the Pi4. I've begun to wonder whether I've got a bum Pi4. Sometimes the Pi4 is great, and other times frustrating. Gotta hope these Pi4 wrinkles get ironed out in reasonable time....