Paragon Chat locks up after update

[jessica6]

I have a iMac with 16G of memory, running VirtualBox.  I have Windows 7 running in a VM, with Paragon Chat.
Up until a few days ago it was running great.  But then my iMac wanted to update to the newer MacOS: El Capitan.
Long story short-- after doing this, I needed to reinstall VirtualBox.
Windows 7 still runs fine, doesn't crash.  But Paragon Chat will totally lock up after a few minutes.  Windows 7 is still running, so Windows itself isn't locking up.
Everything else in my virtual environment is fine.
Anyone have any ideas on what to try?  I've tried adjusting the RAM, and video RAM, but can't seem to fix it.
Any logs?

Any help would be great.

Thanks!
jessica

[jessica6]

Also, when it locks up, the sound is still playing.  However, the mouse is unresponsive.   It just appears to have frozen.

Thanks!

[jessica6]

After trying countless variations on memory, CPU, etc., I finally figured it out.  Not very intuitive, either.
The problem was the number of CPUs.  The only way I could get the Paragon Chat to not crash was to make sure only 1 CPU was assigned to the VM.
Strange that Paragon Chat couldn't handle multiple CPUs.
Anyone have a good explanation for this?

[FloatingFatMan]

After trying countless variations on memory, CPU, etc., I finally figured it out.  Not very intuitive, either.
The problem was the number of CPUs.  The only way I could get the Paragon Chat to not crash was to make sure only 1 CPU was assigned to the VM.
Strange that Paragon Chat couldn't handle multiple CPUs.
Anyone have a good explanation for this?

It handles multiple CPU's just fine running natively. Perhaps the issue is more down to your virtual machine?

[Codewalker]

It sounds like it's the COH client that's running into issues, not Paragon Chat. Given my experiences with it in the past, I strongly suspect bugs in VirtualBox's OpenGL passthrough driver. That would make sense as threading in OpenGL is a very difficult thing to implement and sometimes not even the graphics cards manufacturers get it right, to say nothing about the gymnastics involved in virtualizing it. It would also explain why it started happening after an OS upgrade, which would presumably come with a newer native GL driver that might not play nicely with VirtualBox.

One thing you may want to try is to add the extra CPU(s) back to the VM and add the client command-line parameter -renderthread 0 (you would put it in the 'extra command line parameters' box in the Paragon Chat options panel).

That will prevent the COH client from trying to render in a separate thread, which might avoid the issue with the driver. If it works, it would still allow Paragon Chat itself to benefit from having the extra cores available rather than having to share a single CPU with the client.