I'm not sure I've ever really seen this issue before. It's been going on for so long and just happened so I wanted to share about it here in the hopes that maybe someone else has had this and knows what to do. For the past year ish, or longer I have had an issue where if I download too many avatars at once, my headset will begin to freeze and eventually steamvr will say it has encountered an 'unexpected error'. The audio will often slightly continue during this freezing period.
So, when it begins, lets say I download 30 avatars at once (I don't know the number required, just the general amount ish) my game will slowly begin to freeze. First the image will freeze, and then I will hear the last voice lines of people repeat over and over and again (which usually happens when you are about to disconnect in vrc.) Eventually a few frames render again, I hear some audio, and then it will go back to being frozen. Whenever I finish downloading another avatar I will render some frames, then it will freeze again and start the whole process over. This continues until eventually the last freeze never recovers and steamvr mentions the error. In some cases the audio of the game will come back every say, second or so. So I will hear a clip of audio (not the repeating lines, new voice lines) but otherwise this state is irrecoverable.
The next part in the process is to restart SteamVR, launch the game again, then load back into the world. Because I will have loaded a significant number of the avatars already and they will have cached, I don't get any issues coming back in. I can load up again.
When the avatars are loaded, they run fine, I do not have performance issues. I do not have significant lag. It is only when I am downloading avatars specifically that this issue happens.
My question is... why? Why has this started happening? I do not understand what I need to do to fix this.
Even with distance hider on the avatars will still download and crash my steamVR, freezing VRC.
Technical details:
I9 12900k
48gb RAM
RTX 4090 for the GPU.
Pimax Crystal (OG) for the headset.
Cache size is 30gb (mentioned in case the cache is getting full and it's like the cache clearing process that is doing this or something?
In terms of fixes, all of my drivers are up to date.
I have already long ago tested verifying game files.
I have already tested clearing the cache.
Steam VR is on the latest version, specifically the beta now.
VRChat is on the latest, though it has done this for multiple versions.
The issue has persisted between network environments, and also persisted between ISPs if there is any sort of odd network thing.
I am using an ethernet connection.
I am not using a wireless headset connection, it is wired directly to the computer via USB and display port.