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Komag
Roku Guru

Hard crash with no diagnostic feedback, not replicatable

Over the past year I've rarely (meaning it's happening maybe 5 or 6 times in a year of almost daily use) experienced a very hard crash while testing the game I'm working on. When the crash happens, nothing can be done, no information from the diagnostics console comes through, and I can't even press Home to go to Roku main menu, and even worse, I can't even press power to turn off the Roku TV! It just sits there with my game on the screen, frozen. After a little while, the Roku TV resets itself.

On other occasions when the crash occurs, I've let it sit, and nothing happens at all for a long time (such as 15 minutes.) Then if I hit Home or Power on the remote, still nothing immediately happens, but then the Roku TV will reset after a little bit (possibly 30 seconds or so). I assume there is some deep unseen setting that can detects a remote press of Home or Power, and realizes that if nothing happens, the system must be crashed, thus it resets itself. This is on an Element 4K Roku TV (7522X), and also on a Stick (3810X) (these are just the two models I've been using the most recently, so I don't know if the issue might also exist on other models).

Has anyone else experienced such crashes before? I never have in previous years, and I've been working on this project for over 7 years now! Of course I often write bad code and get program crashes-a-plenty, where I can go into the terminal and check variables and see the crash information of what line had the problem, etc. But with these big crashes, NOTHING. There is no error message, no feedback, and the terminal no longer works, although it SEEMS like nothing is wrong with it. The terminal only gives the disconnect error message when the Roku system finally resets itself.

This happens so rarely that I can't even begin to try to figure out what might have caused it. Any ideas?

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2 REPLIES 2
renojim
Community Streaming Expert

Re: Hard crash with no diagnostic feedback, not replicatable

I think I've experienced this, but it's been a while since I've done any heavy development, so I can't say for sure.  It sounds vaguely familiar and I definitely didn't find a solution.  I just chalk it up to some kind of Roku glitch and presume my code couldn't possibly be bad.  Smiley Happy  I kind of assume it's some kind of memory management issue.  Can you connect to port 8080 when it happens?

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Komag
Roku Guru

Re: Hard crash with no diagnostic feedback, not replicatable

I haven't tried checking 8080 at those (rare) times. If it happens again and I remember, I'll try that.

I also wonder if it could be overheating, but I'm not sure how I could test that on a Roku TV model. On a stick or puck model I could maybe just feel the unit, but they often run hot anyway so I'm sure if I could tell any difference.

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