And just like that, it’s broken again…
After running Shotcut successfully, without issue last night (after cleanly re-installing it), when I tried to use it again this morning on my test input file - it was back to the same old problem! After attempting to import the small MP4 input file, the UI hung, and a minute or so later the Shotcut process once again started consuming memory hand over fist. I killed the process when it was passing 8GB of memory usage for the 56MB input file…
Not clear what could have “broken it” from last night to this morning. About the only desktop apps I had run were the web browser, standard Windows e-mail client, and Destiny 2 (off EPIC). All the normal background services were constantly running of course which included: Abyss web server, Bonic, CoreTemp, CrashPlan online backup, Discord’s background service, Filezilla FTP server, iSpy security camera hub, Telegram, and Zoom’s background service. All of these have been running for years, successfully co-existing with Shotcut for all of that time. None of the messaging apps that Microsoft packaged in Windows 11 were enabled or running.
So as a quick fix, I simply re-installed Shotcut again - this time over top of the same install directory - again having it clear all the registry entries. I also manually removed all the stuff in Shotcut’s working directory - noting that this time the SQL DB actually contained some data, which it had not when I went through this last night.
Upon restarting Shotcut again, I changed it’s temp working directory from its default location on the C-drive and after it restarted itself again noticed that the SQL DB again had something in it - so I manually erased it again.
After all that, yep - Shotcut was able to import the test file just fine, taking a second or two to do it with the UI responding normally as soon as it was done. Now the question is, for how long will this keep working?
It’ll be sort of painful if I’ll have to re-install Shotcut every time I want to use it and begs the question - what is in the Shotcut registry entries and where exactly are these hidden in the registry? I haven’t played around enough with the Sysinternals utilities enough yet to figure out how to get it to show me…
I can’t really imagine that any other app would be messing with the Shotcut registry entries, or how corrupting them could or should cause the hung UI and wild memory consumption effects.
Does anyone know of any way to turn on more detailed debug entries in the Shotcut log file? Really curious about what it thinks it’s doing when it’s grabbing half a gigabyte of memory every second or so.
Also, does anyone know where it stashes its entries in the Windows registry and exactly what type of information it is keeping there? The installer implies that it is configuration information, but that also seems to be some of what’s in the working directory too.
Back to square one!