Hi, I too suffer the instability of M4L devices. Particularly, it seems, the larger devices - but sometimes it could be any (I think).
Makes me doubly careful to hit Ctrl-S regularly!
I've trimmed my system down as much as I can possibly get away with, and still have a useable PC that can connect to the net.
When some (no real pattern) MaxForLive devices are loaded in the Set, Ableton 'freezes' occasionally too. Using ProcessExplorer, I've discovered that Live.exe is spiking to 99-100% CPU for maybe 5-10 seconds at a time, then recovers for maybe a minute or two, until the next freeze. Live itself doesn't crash, and like I say, there's no real pattern to when this event happens, but I believe that MaxForLive devices are the common denominator.
I've cleared out every old/unused ASIO and Midi driver from my system, except my Focusrite Scarlett and SonicCore Scope drivers, aggressively disabled Windows Services, disabled real-time scanning in Microsoft Security Essentials, disabled Windows Update, did all the other bits that S|C recommend for smooth-running Scope, uninstalled and then reinstalled both Live and the Max Runtime, and wrote a little batch script I can run as Administrator that kills other services that I occasionally use (like the Dropbox app and the NVidia Control Panel software), and while it may have alleviated the frequency of occurrence, it still hasn't fully gone away.
One thing I did not do is save the Live Set after the freeze happens. So, I'm not sure if restarting Live would mean that the freezing no longer happens - or if there's something written to the Live Set that would cause the freeze to reoccur when I load the set again. I'm always afraid that I would corrupt my Live Set if a freeze happens - instead, I just exit Live and choose not to save the Set. And yes, this has made me very diligent with CTRL-S when working in Live.
And I do get the crashes too. Crashes that aren't OutOfMemory issues, crashes mostly when loading devices (esp. MaxForLive devices) that are complex.
I understand that a straw poll such as the one in this post aren't scientific - but the same percentage of Windows users have Stability of M4L that don't. Regardless of the sample size, or who might be answering, that is not sustainable! In the face of direct competition from Bitwig, Ableton have to prioritise this.
Like, in a Beta Release, is there any flag we can pass to the Live runtime to get it to omit deeper messages?
And would getting an SSD for my Sample drive be a good idea to help alleviate the crashes I get when loading M4L devices that use loads of samples?
There's some synchronisation bug happening here. Heck, if they want a PC to aid with replication, I'll ship them mine!
Maybe those of us that do experience M4L crashes have some common issue? I'd be willing to supply system specs of what's running when I do have crashes, enumerate loaded drivers, whatever...
And no, I haven't yet sent Ableton a crash report. I am gonna devote tonight / tomorrow to working some pattern, any pattern, (even if the pattern is "There is no pattern") and annotate my crash dumps with info that I hope Ableton will find usable and useful.
This instability simply is not sustainable. I'm a programmer by day, a deployment engineer - if the software we deliver in my workplace acted like this...... well, it did after one release, and yes, I worked an 87 hour week that week..........
Win7 32-bit.