SpectrophotometricColorCalibration in PixInsight Locking up the Computer

[old_eyes]

Having problems with SPCC locking up the computer

I am currently processing OSC images in PixInsight on a Win 10 computer. After calibration and stacking using WBPP, I do a dynamic background extraction followed by SPCC before starting to stretch or do noise reduction. I am working on a linear image.

When I start SPCC, it gets as far as "Searching for optimal magnitude limit..." and then hangs. I have left the process running overnight and it is still running in the morning, using a steady 21% of CPU (presumably stuck in an intensive loop). The only way out is to kill the Pixinsight process using the Task Manager. Sometimes it is necessary to reboot the computer to get Pixinsight to start again.

The console looks like this:

SPCC previously has worked brilliantly, so I don't know what has changed.

I am managing at the moment by using the older PhotometricColorCalibration tool, but puzzled. SPCC works better for me than PCC so I would like to use it if I can.

I have posted a query on the PixInsight forum, but on the off-chance someone has seen this problem before, I am also posting it here.

[Oddsocks]

Richard.

I noticed that your topic on the PixInsight forum seems to have fallen off the radar, not that unusual for sporadic issues such as these.

To re-start your P.I. thread you will need to provide the data that is causing the problem, the P.I. authors won't reply to you without that.

Upload your problem image to Dropbox or GoogleDrive and post a share link in your P.I. thread and hopefully one of the dev's will take a look at it.

This kind of problem crops up sometimes due to memory exhaustion, or some kind of corruption in the data.

One thing to try yourself is just take three of the best calibrated RGB frames, un-stacked, and assemble into an RGB image then run DBE and SPCC.

If this succeeds then go back over your original input data and check for bad frames that might have slipped through to the combined RGB image and that are problematic for SPCC.

Other than the above, when the problem occurs check how much RAM memory is available and whether P.I is shuffling data between swap folders because it has run out of usable RAM. If you have not configured a swap folder on your HD for P.I. to use as virtual memory then try that since Windows has a problem sometimes managing that for itself.

Lastly, if P.I. crashes for any reason it might leave behind orphaned temporary files in the temp folder, and any swap folder that you create for yourself, so check in your C:/Users/<your user name>/AppData/Local/TEMP folder for any orphaned P.I. files and delete them, then do the same for your HD swap folders if you created those and configured P.I. to use them.

William.

Edited March 17, 2023 by Oddsocks
Poor grammar