Windows client freeze and cannot restart without reboot

[joergn1970]

Hi,

I am using the free Windows client (Windows 10) to connect to a Ubuntu 22.10 desktop (Gnome-based ubuntu standard desktop with Wayland). NoMachine has been installed yesterday on both and they are therefore the latest versions. I am connecting to a physical display.

In general, this worked nicely and I am very happy with the speed and quality. However, the client freezes after a while. It takes about 30 minutes and then the remote window and the client application window are both frozen. They can only be removed by ending the process.

After this is happening, I cannot restart the windows client. If I try, I see a process of the player appear in Task Manager, but no window opens. I need to reboot the windows computer before this is fixed. After a reboot I can start another remote session, and the entire procedure is repeating.

Do you have any idea what might cause this behavior? I checked Windows logs and NoMachine player logs, but I did not get any indication about the cause or what to do. Please help.

I have added some logs from the last session that was open and froze with the described consequences. Please instruct what I can do or check!

 

 

[joergn1970]

In my setup the server is my private home server and the client is my work laptop. I suspected that the problem is related our enterprise security policies, which are allergic to incoming connection to our devices. Therefore the server component of the free Windows software is a problem. I do not need the server on the Windows system. I uninstalled NoMachine free version and downloaded and installed the Enterprise Client. From what I can see it is basically the same client, but without the integrated server. This seem to work. I did now use it for a few hours without any freezing or other strange behavior. It is actually very responsive even in higher screen resolutions.

[Bilbotine]

Hi joergn1970,

In order to investigate, we need the logs from:

%USERPROFILE%\.nx

%ProgramData%\NoMachine\var\log

Can you please send them by email to forum[at]nomachine[dot]com, making sure to reference the topic as the subject of the email?

Thanks!

[joergn1970]

Hi,

Thanks for your help.

I did include the logs from the .nx folder that did show successful sessions as well as those that show up after I had to kill the client and restarting the enterprise client did not produce a window. The latter ones are the very short session logs.

Please note that I recently use the server connection over an ssh tunnel with implicit forward of port 4000. The connection is therefore made to localhost:4000. If I do not use the tunnel, but direct connection, the symptoms of occasional freeze with killing the client process and then needing a reboot before a client window is available again are the same. I use the tunnel, because I also wanted to use the connection from remote, but do not want to open the server port through router port forwarding and expose it publicly. All logs attached in the mail are from sessions in my home LAN.

My use case is connecting to my home server from my work laptop.

[Britgirl]

Could you try disabling hardware decoding on the machine you are connecting from?

Follow the instructions :

1. Quit the Player and disable hardware decoding in the player.cfg -> option key="Enable hardware accelerated decoding" value="disabled". Restart the Player. Try connecting again. If that doesn’t help, go to point 2.

2. Disable hardware encoding on your Linux machine -> option key="EnableHardwareEncoding” key to 0 in node.cfg on the server side. Restart the server.

3. Try connecting again.

Does this help? Does anything change if you update to 8.3.1?

 

[joergn1970]

Hi Britgirl,

Thanks for your help. I started now with the software update only. I will observe how it performs and if the issue is gone with the new version. By the way, I updated the version on both, the client and server, to 8.3.1.

If this does not help, I will try your other proposals. I think hardware decode/encode is a useful feature and I only want to disable it if the new software version still shows the same problem.

By the way, the load on the GPU caused by hardware decode is quite low in my opinion. Windows task manager shows around 20-30% 3D load and 5-6% video decoding load for the Iris Xe GPU on my laptop with the NX client. I had to play a video on the shared desktop to cause a continued image change and see any sustained GPU load at all. But this is of course expected.

I think I have to observe this for some time before I declare the problem gone or not as the described problem happens only once in a while now. It is rare enough to accept it if the only thing needed would be to restart the client software. But having to reboot the entire client machine is the annoying part.

I have some testing to do now and I will report on the results.

[Author]

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