Visual Studio freeze while debugging

Hey there,
sometimes (1 out of 8 times) my freezes while debuging with Visual Studio and the only way to get out is to restart my pc. It is doing that while Visual Studio is loading symbols (attached picture).

While it is freezed, ctl+alt+del or other shortcuts are not working… I can move my mouse, i can click the “close” button (attached picture) so that the “Loading…” window closes, but everything else is freezed.

Iam using UE 4.8.3, Visual Studio 2013 Professional Update 5, Windows 10 64 Bit. There are no compiler errors and after the restart the debugging usually works for the first time. I would guess something with my Visual Studio configuration is wrong. Can someone help me?

I’m having the exact same issue, on almost the exact same setup (same OS, engine version and VS version). I have found that the only way I can avoid this is to open the taskmanager before building, and immediately terminating the UE process if I notice it happening, else the computer will settle into a state of unresponsiveness that, as you say, can only be fixed by a hard reset.

Having the same issue here :frowning:
Pretty sure it’s an issue with Windows 10 together with UE, as this only started happening after upgrading to Win10. I can also confirm, that this issue is still around on the newest preview build of 4.9 (preview 4 as of now)

Do you guys using engine launcher (with premade PDBs) or from source?

I used the Unreal Engine Launcher to create my project. And since then iam starting the project with the PROJECTNAME.sln file. To prevent VS from crashing i try to use the compile button in the editor as often as i can, but sometimes the hot reload doesn’t work…

Can you try engine from source, builded in Win10? To check if any premade PDB is the fault, as it crash on loading of symbols from PDBs

I have installed Win10 on a completely fresh Windows 8.1 build. And i have also created the project with Win10. Bevor i used Windows 10, i never programmed something for Unreal Engine.

I have this problem both with premade Engine and a source build engine, i’m also on windows 10

same issue. windows 10. once built, can run it fine w/ out running from visual studio 2013 debugger. NO idea how to resolve it…
unreal engine 4.8.3 still.
machines running win 8.1 still working fine.

same issue i always have to hard reset. @Epic Fix this please

Hey Everyone,

Has anyone experienced this freezing with non-UE4 projects? Is this happening when opening a project’s solution with the .sln or through the editor? Does this happen if Visual Studio is opened and the project is then opened through VS?

Hey ,

I’ve only had this freezing with UE4, specifically projects built on 4.8.3 and 4.9.0. This only happens when opening a project’s solution and then pressing “Start Debugging” (or F5), and I’ve had it happen through opening the .sln file from Windows Explorer and also through opening the solution from VS.

It’ll freeze on loading symbols, but it’s not always the same symbols. And like the others have said, it happens every so often, so it isn’t 100% reproducible.

Also having this issue with Unreal 4.9.2. It’s becoming very infuriating as it occurs approximately 1 in every 5 times I attempt to debug my project. I dread everytime I press that F5 key. It’s a case of making sure the task manager is open before you start debugging and spam the “End Task” command before your system locks up.

I’ve opened the project via Unreal and the sln file and it still happens. This issue never happens with any other non-Unreal projects.

this is a fresh project generated from the 3P template . Its really annoying… i dont know how to fix it. Basically i cant use debugging for the time being.

It only happens when u hit debugging and it launches the editor from visual studio. it doesnt happen any other way for me. If the engine is already open well its fine as long as you arent starting a new debug process.

For me it happens once every hour randomly just whenever i tab debug and it starts loading symbols. The Entire computer freezes up,visual studio freezes, canceling the loading seems to make it happen faster and eventually you have to unplug your or hold down the power button to reset the computer. Task manager wont even fix it. I tried leaving it open for when i debug either im not fast enough ending the process or it doesn’t matter to begin with but even task manager gets affected and freezes up as well. Only thing that keeps working sometimes if im in a Skype call or teamspeak 3 but i can only hear and talk the actually GUI window is frozen and unresponsive.

Could it be a randomly memory leak only happening on windows 10 when loading symbols?

Did you try to delete the sdf, sln and suo file and run the GenerateProjectFiles.bat again?

Hey Everyone,

Since this freeze is not 100% I tried about a dozen times but still did not get VS to freeze when running debug. This was using Windows 10 and VS2013. Could anyone that is still getting this freeze confirm which version of Visual Studio they’re using as well as post their DXDiag for more information?

Thanks

link text
Iam using Vs Professinal 2013 Version 12.0.40629.00 Update 5.

Yesterday i started Vs, opened the project via “last used projects” and started the debug by rightclicking onto the projectname in the solution expolorer → “Debug”->“start new instance”. Then i got a freeze (same as Dark583 described). After a hard reset and doing the same thing i got a freeze again. But sometimes it is working.

(I had Unreal Engine opened while running DXDiag, and there are some crashes by myself in there, so don´t worry…)

We are still investigating this but have not been able to reproduce the issue locally. For anyone having this freezing issue while debugging, has this reproduced for anyone in a newly created project? Does anyone has a small sample project that is experiencing this that they could post to help with our investigation?

Hi Sean,

The problem is the majority of us can’t really provide you with a project because this issue is, at least from my perspective, completely random. The only thing I can offer is that I’m using Unreal 4.9.2, Windows 10, VS 2013 12.0.4xxxxx Update 5, dual screen set up. It may be more of a VS problem than Unreal, and may be worth attempting to debug on multiple machines over and over again to see if the issue occurs at your end. I can tell you that when I do so, the system lock up bug happens about 1 in every 5 times.

Hello everyone,

We have tried to reproduce the issue a number of times in our own projects, but are unable to do so. Could anyone provide a project that they are experiencing the Visual Studio freeze in?