Any DAW that crashes becomes a "zombie"

[CrushCrawfish]

Of all the DAWs I've used over years with my Delta 1010LT (Acid Pro 6, FL Studio 8 trial, Cubase 5/5.5, Studio One 2, Reaper 4 trial), whenever one has crashed it has stayed memory resident - opening up the task manager will show its process still there, eating up the same amount of memory as it was when it went down. Even worse is that they're "zombie" processes; I can't kill them no matter what method is tried, with the only solutions being to either wait around an hour for the process to go away on its on or to reboot the system.

Why does it have to go away? Aside from hogging up a lot of memory it also keeps the ASIO driver locked, meaning that whenever I try to start it (or any other application that uses ASIO) up again, it cries about ASIO being in use/unavailable.

DAW crashes happen about once a week for me now (about ten times daily with Acid), but it's still incredibly annoying when it happens. What exactly is going on? Is there any remedy?

For the record, I've always made sure that my 1010LT's drivers are up to date.

[LawrenceF]

I've experienced the zombie thing with Win 7 also. What I eventually learned to do was to just log off and log back on to clear it, rather than rebooting. Logging off seems to (at least here) terminate the zombies.

[CTStump]

When you open the task manager under the process tab Highlight the process(whatever .exe your having the problem with), right click and choose end process,ignore warning and press okay.
That should end the program and clear the ram so you can restart the program.

Also you can set the priority to high( while the .exe is running stable ) so the .exe is not interrupted by a Cache call from a background service but be aware the stability may be compromised depending on the .exe.

*WARNING* DO NOT SET TO REAL TIME or you really be in trouble.

[LawrenceF]

Yeah, I assumed that what he meant by "zombie" is that it's "dead" but it's still there, the living dead , it actually won't unload from the task manager when you context click "End Process" or "End Process Tree".

That's what I assumed anyway. Perfect name for it (zombie) though.

[CrushCrawfish]

I've experienced the zombie thing with Win 7 also. What I eventually learned to do was to just log off and log back on to clear it, rather than rebooting. Logging off seems to (at least here) terminate the zombies.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. What's odd is that logging off/on would only work sometimes, so that's why I just started rebooting outright. I will try that again next time it happens though, since drivers have gone through updates over time, etc. etc.

When you open the task manager under the process tab Highlight the process(whatever .exe your having the problem with), right click and choose end process,ignore warning and press okay.

It's never worked for me. It's also the first thing I tried (along with end process tree). Other methods I've tried include using built-in command line applications (e.g. taskkill), as well as trying third-party tools, which haven't worked either.

What's strange is that the command line applications would always report the operation as successful (despite the opposite being the case).

[tony tony chopper]

it's audio drivers that tend to zombify dead apps

[LawrenceF]

What's odd is that logging off/on would only work sometimes, so that's why I just started rebooting outright. I will try that again next time it happens though, since drivers have gone through updates over time, etc. etc.

I hear you. I also learned that if a very large DAW project using tons of ram gets "Zombified", if I log off to clear it I eventually get a blue screen, so I kind of look at the used memory of the process.

If it's rather low I just log on/off. If it's a few GB, I always reboot.

I try to remember to always unload really big songs before quitting DAW apps. If I have a really huge project running and quit the application the Zombie chances kinda goes up.

[CTStump]

+1 log off then log on like LawrenceF say's, disregard any comment that I have made.

What work's is what is important. I don't think there is a utility out there to clear the ram yet but then I could be wrong.

[hibidy]

I'm not sure I'm following exactly but I always reboot after a crash. Just saves issues from happening.

[LawrenceF]

I'm not sure I'm following exactly but I always reboot after a crash. Just saves issues from happening.

It depends. Some apps will crash and not really bother anything else on system at all. The "zombie" thing is more a case when an app's process just can't manually be shut down at all. I've seen it occasionally on Win since probably XP.

It can happen with a app crash or it can happen with a normal ordinary app you just shutdown manually... where the process (for some unknown reason) just can't be unloaded.

Sometimes you don't even know it (no crash, no visible issue) until you go to launch the app again the next day and you get a dialog telling you it's already running... assuming it's a single launch instance app.

[pwal]

it's audio drivers that tend to zombify dead apps

this
if your audio interface is external, turning it off & on again can sometimes get windows to unload the drivers, quicker than logoff/reboot if it works

[4damind]

Rebooting
It seems that the M-Audio ASIO driver is blocking the DAW. Sometimes the DAW can be killed with the taskmanager but often Asio is still blocked.
I think this is some bug with the M-Audio ASIO driver. The quality of all their stuff is bad, they have also a lot of problems with the drivers for the controllers (hypercontrol).

[gamecat666]

i get this with a Roland/cakewalk UA-1g, if any audio app crashes it stays resident and takes the ASIO hostage..
I cant remove it in the task manager so have to reboot.

[roland_rock]

It does sound very much like a problem with the soundcard drivers rather than the DAW applications themselves - from what you say the crashes occur with a number of different DAWs, the common factor being the audio driver.
Also drivers tend to run at a higher privilege level (I forget the proper term) than applications, so are more likely to be able to be able to stop things being unloaded when they crash.

As an experiment, you could try using ASIO4ALL instead of the native M-audio ASIO drivers - just to see if changing the audio driver helps.

[xNiMiNx]

There are a handful of options when it comes to logon/logoff. IIRC fast user switching is the option that determines if applications will stay in RAM when you logoff.

Logging off (I have this option disabled, only shutdown) may or may not do the trick depending on which services/options you have.

Dont know about Win7, but for XP i really like DTaskManager. I'm sure there are others, but DTM is free, you can set it to be what pops up on 3 finger salute, or you can create a shortcut to it, and have both task managers (so it doesnt overwrite any windows files or settings).

1. Three different ways to close a process, as the "termination request", the standard "forced termination" with dialogue tolerance, and the "forced termination" of any type of process, bypassing all permissions (it can also terminate running system processes).

2. Allows you to suspend and reactivate a process (as in Linux). This is useful, for example, to temporarily suspend a task that uses system resources when you don't want to terminate it (such as a DivX encoding process).

3. Allows you to select more than one process at a time, and terminate all of them "simultaneously".

But yeah, as far as the debate of shutdown or relog, its really dependant on your windows configuration, at least when XP is concerned.