4 replies to this topic

[Jerry Bryan]

I didn't know whether to post this under Issues or under FamilySearch, but it seems to me to be more of an RM issue than a FamilySearch issue, so I am posting here.

 

I have had several instances lately where RM7 locks up when I click on the FamilySearch icon to go look at a matched person in FamilySearch. The process of getting into FamilySearch is successful. I look at the person in FamilySearch, make no changes, and close the browser window. RM is now locked up. RM is not in a loop because it is taking no CPU cycles. But it is completely unresponsive. The only way out is to use Task Manager to kill RM and then to restart RM.

It's hard to know how to get any diagnostic information to help identify the cause of the problem. And I don't expect or want any effort to go into solving this in RM7. I do hope that RM8 locks up less and has fewer invalid address kinds of errors than RM7. We shall see. With its less modal design, RM8 is going to have to be very careful about such issues. I'm pretty convinced that a lot of RM7's problems in this area have to do with background tasks that are performed in threads that are not being properly synchronized. That's why I think RM8 will have to be especially careful about proper synchronization between its non-modal windows.

 

Jerry

[Jerry Bryan]

Before killing RM and restarting it, I decided to look at it with a tool called Process Explorer, which has a few more advanced features than the standard Windows Task Explorer. Process Explorer says that RM is using about 0.04% or 0.05% CPU time. That's very little CPU time, but it is still running. It looks to me that RM is in a polling loop. That means it is sleeping briefly, waking up, looking to see if some event has happened, and then going back to sleep and repeating the loop - waiting for an event that never seems to happen.

Jerry

[hendro]

I'm doing a lot of work lately with FamilySearch.  I'm generally downloading stuff, but like you, every once in a while it goes into lala land and freezes up.  I also notice that the index on the left side is empty and there is an icon in its place.  Happens about once or twice an hour as I am downloading a lot of stuff.  Every once in a while I go into tools and clean up the database as I'm sure killing the process may leave the database in an unknown state.  It happens more than getting a process error now with this latest version.  I'm not sure what's going on with the error handlers in RM.  I always open Task Manager and keep it open when I'm working in RM.

[ricko2001]

Same here. 

I frequently get lock-ups using FamilySearch Person Tools.

I'm not just worried about some race condition. There are many times when I get access violation errors. A bug in RM code could mess up memory in SQLite's address spaces as well.

[robertjacobs0]

This may be a Windows problem rather than a RootsMagic problem. I've seen other programs lock up when an internet connection stalls. IIRC, the problem existed as far back as Windows Vista and can still bedevil one in Windows 10 (my present version). Task Manager won't always release the machine — on a few (rare) occasions I've had to reboot completely.