Question / Help System instability when streaming

[Linaori]

Heya,

Been trying out OBS for a week now. Most of the time it goes fine for a while when streaming, while other times I have serious issues. A few issues listed:

• World of Warcraft complains about memory issues (only using 60%)
• Firefox complaining about memory issues despite having more than enough
• Firefox and other graphical apps glitching like failing to render properly, firefox showing green squares that blink
• Final Fantasy 14 crashed twice while playing with graphic settings while also streaming
• dwm.exe crashing
• imgur pages crashing tabs immediately upon opening a page
• mixer page complaining about memory issues
• the above all combined also cause my Nvidia drivers to crash hard enough that windows reverts back to basic drivers.

A few things I've been paying attention to:

• Memory is never above 65% in these scenarios
• GPU is not at 100%, usually at 60~80% max
• VRAM is low (1060 3GB)
• CPU is only doing 20% max

I'm going to run a memory test to see if my memory might be broken. Not sure how to test my GPU though. These issues only seem to happen when streaming, otherwise my system runs totally fine. If RAM is the issue, I'd expect more system instability, same goes for the GPU. Any clue what the cause could be?

Here's the attached log file, I could personally not find an issue in relating to any crashes though: https://gist.github.com/linaori/9c41dc29b068f4b4c1b93064271deb2a

Here's the browser tab crashing inside obs:

Faulting application name: obs-browser-page.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x5ea62643
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 10.0.18362.815, time stamp: 0xb89efff3
Exception code: 0xe0000008
Fault offset: 0x000000000003a799
Faulting process ID: 0x2df8
Faulting application start time: 0x01d6306f8cc01827
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\obs-studio\obs-plugins\64bit\obs-browser-page.exe
Faulting module path: C:\WINDOWS\System32\KERNELBASE.dll
Report ID: 714574be-bdc0-4e9c-84a5-02ef74f4658f
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

 

[Linaori]

I've managed to find this error:

Windows successfully diagnosed a low virtual memory condition. The following programs consumed the most virtual memory: Wow.exe (284) consumed 4851679232 bytes, firefox.exe (16812) consumed 641896448 bytes, and obs64.exe (9924) consumed 407773184 bytes.

I've done some checking:

• 6 minute memory test caused 0 errors
• My page file size is managed by windows and is 49152MB
• I have 16GB ram
• SSD has enough storage left and is at 100% health according to crystal disk

Not sure anymore what the cause could be...

 

[Harold]

There may be a failing video card in this.
Other problems could include unstable overclocking, outdated bios.

 

[carlmmii]

Agreed with Harold. Everything points towards VRAM issues.

 

[Linaori]

I have not overclocked anything, my bios is for sure outdated (2 years behind). I'm not sure if I'll be able to update that right now. How can I test my vram? I know that it's running at 2.9/3gb at most of the time, though I figured that if anything, I'd get performance drops if this were an issue. Also not sure why the systems are complaining about (virtual) memory, though that could be windows being obscure.

Would it help to switch from hardware to software encoding? I think my CPU should be able to handle that without issues.

 

[Linaori]

TL;DR
Issue seems to be voicemeeter in combination with OBS just running, not necessarily streaming.

Okay, update:

• I have not yet updated my BIOS, I want to keep that as a last resort as I don't know if it will fix the issue
• The issue is "committed" memory. What's causing it, I don't know. I've used several tools such as Process Hacker and power shell scripts to find out, to no avail
• After roughly 2 hours of streaming, I was at 31/65GB of committed memory, this was ~9GB when I started
• Happens as long as OBS is running, no matter what (forgot to mute all audio channels to test though)
• Found a similar issue on these forums from not too long ago, sadly no answer (people please post your answer!)
• The last comment made me dig into voicemeeter banana, which I've also installed 1 day after I started streaming
• I could find no issues with voicemeeter banana in regards of committed memory or other leaks on the internet
• I've removed voicemeeter banana, restarted my system and have been streaming for about 12 minutes now, and my committed memory is between 8.4GB and 8.8GB, though I've used the system in between, like writing this reply.

This isn't a perfect solution, as I need a tool like voicemeeter to be able to not send firefox/discord audio to the same output as the game (Discord privacy). Sadly this is the only option for me to stream at the moment. Maybe I'll get around to updating my BIOS and try again some time.

 

[jk_oliver]

I have the same issue.
when I'm recording video for 2-3 minutes,
OBS, DWM, NVIDIA driver will be crashed,
memory is never above 50% in this case, same 'Out of Virtual Memory' event appear in windows log.
No OC, VRAM test is fine(with OCCT, 1hr duration test), althoughI'm using software encoder.