Viscosity hangs when connection drops

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SirDice

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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2016 10:06 pm

Post by SirDice » Wed Feb 10, 2016 10:16 pm
I've been using Viscosity for quite some time on Windows 10. We use Viscosity to connect to our datacenter servers. Lately we are having some connection problems at the office. When the connection drops Viscosity will sometimes automatically reconnect but most of the time it will just hang and not respond any more.

Right clicking on the icon in the tray will show the menu but nothing can be selected and the menu will "stick", it doesn't disappear when the mouse is moved away. Nothing responds. The only course of action is to kill the Viscosity and OpenVPN daemon processes using task manager.

This is on Windows 10 Home 64 bit. Viscosity 1.5.10 (1385).

Eric

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Post by Eric » Thu Feb 11, 2016 10:23 am
Hi SirDice,

We've had two or three reports of this happening very recently. We made some changes in a previous beta that all reporters have said have helped, so give it a go and see if it does.

To update to the latest beta, go to Preferences -> General, tick Include Beta updates and click Check Now.

Has anything changed on the computer this is happening to recently? Addition or major update of Anti Virus software or new Windows features or other software?

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
Support: http://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sparklabs

SirDice

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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2016 10:06 pm

Post by SirDice » Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:18 pm
Apart from the occasional drops on the company's internet connection nothing changed recently.

This morning I updated to version 1.6.0 (1415) and the issue remains. I'll give the beta a try.

SirDice

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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2016 10:06 pm

Post by SirDice » Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:52 pm
Tried the beta client. The tunnel itself appears to recover automatically after a connection drop, this part definitely improved. But the GUI frontend still hangs frequently. The menu appears when right clicking the tray icon but nothing can be selected and the menu is then "stuck" to the screen.

Eric

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Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:27 am

Post by Eric » Fri Feb 19, 2016 9:06 am
Hi SirDice,

Is it the VPN tunnel that is dropping out or your Internet connection which is causing the tunnel to drop then reconnect?

When the GUI becomes unresponsive, does the RAM usage for Viscosity.exe climb in Task Manager or stay steady?

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
Support: http://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sparklabs

PocketDemon

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Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 3:23 pm

Post by PocketDemon » Wed Feb 24, 2016 3:25 pm
Same issue here with 1.6.1 (1419).

Eric

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Post by Eric » Wed Feb 24, 2016 4:09 pm
Hi PocketDemon,

Is this happening when a connection drops for you also or under different conditions?

When the GUI becomes unresponsive, does the RAM usage for Viscosity.exe climb in Task Manager or stay steady?

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
Support: http://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sparklabs

SirDice

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Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2016 10:06 pm

Post by SirDice » Wed Feb 24, 2016 9:06 pm
Some additional info that may or may not be important.

The laptop used to be Windows 8.1 Home and has been upgraded to Windows 10 last summer. I have been using Viscosity on it for a very long time, updated after every update message. But I can't remember if I had any issues with it back then. The regular connection drops at the office are a fairly recent occurrence. The connection drops somewhere between the office's internet connection and the OpenVPN server at our datacenter. So it's not the "local" ethernet interface of the laptop or the local LAN that drops the connection, it's somewhere on the internet (as far as I've been able to find out it's between two ISP peers that are passed in transit).

I'll keep an eye on the RAM usage if/when the GUI hangs.

PocketDemon

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Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 3:23 pm

Post by PocketDemon » Wed Feb 24, 2016 9:56 pm
it 'should' be a 24/7, 152Mbps cable connection; & manually removing power from the cable router does not cause the issue - so this suggests that it's the VPN tunnel disconnecting that's causing the problem.

I can't tell you about the RAM usage atm, as I need to wait for the problem to reoccur (I came onto here looking for a solution having tried the latest version) - however I did note previously that the CPU usage becomes significantly higher than normal...

Now, it's running on a HP Gen8 Microserver, so there's not the world of cores, but it's going from a normal usage of <=2% to >=45% at the points when Viscosity has hung.

There's very little else actively installed otherwise, so antivirus/firewall (that's only had the general definition updates for some months) & Vuze - & other than the processes associated with that & Win10 Pro's standard ones, the only other thing that's actively in use is IE.

Otherwise, I installed 1.6.1 (1419) to try to solve the issue - it's not this version that has caused it... However I couldn't tell you now which version was installed prior to there being problems.

Eric

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Joined: Sun Jan 03, 2010 3:27 am

Post by Eric » Thu Feb 25, 2016 11:33 am
Thank you both for the feedback, we will try a few things and see if we can reproduce the problem.

Regards,
Eric
Eric Thorpe
Viscosity Developer

Web: http://www.sparklabs.com
Support: http://www.sparklabs.com/support
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sparklabs
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