Again (serious) oddity with virtual desktop manager

Hi,

until now I wasn't very bothered by Dolphin's behavior against virtual
desktop managers.
But now I discovered something, that seems to be of serious nature.
If/when switching between VDs while a _deployed_ image (.img) is running,
this image gets killed (it disappears from the tasklist).
I don't know whether this is specific to the VDManager I have running or
not, but I think it's serious enough to inform OA about this oddity.
All of you, who had problems with VDMs, should test, whether you can verify
a similar behavior.

Bye
Ingo

In article <3b813bec$0$1812$[hidden email]>,
[hidden email] says...
> Hi,
>
> until now I wasn't very bothered by Dolphin's behavior against virtual
> desktop managers.
> But now I discovered something, that seems to be of serious nature.
> If/when switching between VDs while a _deployed_ image (.img) is running,
> this image gets killed (it disappears from the tasklist).

        I saw the exact same thing with both JSPager and MultiDesk. The
Dolphin enviro and deployed apps exhibit the same behavior, namely dying
an untimely death when switching between desktops.

Joey

--
-- Sun Certified Java2 Programmer
-- My Pocket Smalltalk Stuff: www.joeygibson.com/st
--
-- "We thought about killin' him, but we kinda
--  hated to go that far...." - Briscoe Darling



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Ingo

You wrote in message news:3b813bec$0$1812$[hidden email]...
>
> until now I wasn't very bothered by Dolphin's behavior against virtual
> desktop managers.
> But now I discovered something, that seems to be of serious nature.
> If/when switching between VDs while a _deployed_ image (.img) is running,
> this image gets killed (it disappears from the tasklist).
> I don't know whether this is specific to the VDManager I have running or
> not, but I think it's serious enough to inform OA about this oddity.
>...

Which VDM are you running?

Also when you say a deployed .img, do you mean a .exe rather than a .img? Or
are you referring to a crash on a non-Dolphin thread (i.e. the deployment
kept running if one ignored the GPF message box) during application
deployment when switching screens? If so it wasn't anything to do with VDM's
as such, but in fact a more general problem, and it was fixed in PL3 as I
recall. On the other hand are you talking about a .img based application
that results from evaluating "<RunTimeSessionManager class> deploy: <img
name>", e.g. HelloWorldSessionManager deploy: 'HelloWorld'?

Regards

Blair

Blair,

the VDM I have running is named "Powerbar", made by  (Shareware Author?)
PLEMSOFT, Denmark. This thing does an excellent job, for several years on
several platforms (95,98(SE),NT,2000).
But as I mentioned earlier, other VDMs like "Vern" are also incompatible
with
Dolphin, though I cannot tell, whether here this "extreme" behavior shows
up.
I simply have them all deinstalled, since they worked not better than
Powerbar, and
this one is my favourite :)

Yes, I talked about a .img based application
>that results from evaluating "<RunTimeSessionManager class> deploy: <img
>name>", e.g. HelloWorldSessionManager deploy: 'HelloWorld'.

Regards
Ingo


Blair McGlashan schrieb in Nachricht <[hidden email]>... Or
>are you referring to a crash on a non-Dolphin thread (i.e. the deployment
>kept running if one ignored the GPF message box) during application
>deployment when switching screens? If so it wasn't anything to do with
VDM's

Hi Blair,

> But as I mentioned earlier, other VDMs like "Vern" are also incompatible
> with
> Dolphin, though I cannot tell, whether here this "extreme" behavior shows
> up.

Just a crazy suggestion for you to ponder: I don't use VDMs, but, the other
app that I can think of that that's really "incompatible" with Dolphin is
Access 97 - Dolphin comes to a crawl next to it, presumably because Access
is hogging the CPU and Dolphin is letting it get away with it.  Could there
be some message(s) that Dolphin is failing to process?  Of course, the two
problems are most likely unrelated.

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]

FWIW, when you do something resource intensive with VisualAge Smalltalk,
Dolphin also starts crawling along.

Is it a plot by IBM?

jlo

"Bill Schwab" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:9mbi5i$49e$[hidden email]...
> Hi Blair,
>
> > But as I mentioned earlier, other VDMs like "Vern" are also incompatible
> > with
> > Dolphin, though I cannot tell, whether here this "extreme" behavior
shows
> > up.
>
> Just a crazy suggestion for you to ponder: I don't use VDMs, but, the
other
> app that I can think of that that's really "incompatible" with Dolphin is
> Access 97 - Dolphin comes to a crawl next to it, presumably because Access
> is hogging the CPU and Dolphin is letting it get away with it.  Could
there

Bill Schwab wrote:

> Just a crazy suggestion for you to ponder: I don't use VDMs, but, the other
> app that I can think of that that's really "incompatible" with Dolphin is
> Access 97 - Dolphin comes to a crawl next to it, presumably because Access
> is hogging the CPU and Dolphin is letting it get away with it.  Could there
> be some message(s) that Dolphin is failing to process?  Of course, the two
> problems are most likely unrelated.

Similarly, I use both Dolphin Smalltalk and Macromedia Director (which I
think must make me part of an incredibly small demographic) and seem to
have noticed that Dolphin and Director don't play well together.

> Bill



                                           Steve

Bill Schwab <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:9mbi5i$49e$[hidden email]...
> Access 97 - Dolphin comes to a crawl next to it, presumably because Access
> is hogging the CPU and Dolphin is letting it get away with it.  Could
there

I'll add the HP 1220C printer drivers to the list of things that bring
Dolphin to a crawl.  I have to bump up the Dolphin process priority in the
Windows 2000 task manager to "Above Normal" in order for Dolphin to be
usable when someone is printing.

Chris

"Bill Schwab" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:9mbi5i$49e$[hidden email]...
> ...
> Just a crazy suggestion for you to ponder: I don't use VDMs, but, the
other
> app that I can think of that that's really "incompatible" with Dolphin is
> Access 97 - Dolphin comes to a crawl next to it, presumably because Access
> is hogging the CPU and Dolphin is letting it get away with it.  Could
there
> be some message(s) that Dolphin is failing to process?
>...

No, the Dolphin VM is being "over friendly" and relinquishing its GUI thread
timeslice due to an unexpected interaction between InputState's message
dispatch loop (in Smalltalk) and the overlapped call mechanism in the VM.
Normally this has no effect on Dolphin, but when the CPU is being hogged (or
both CPUs are being hogged on a dual CPU machine) GUI update will slow to a
crawl.

In investigating this I discovered that this issue was introduced with
version 3.0 (and in fact I think Bill may have reported it back then). It
has been addressed for the next release, but is not easily patchable since
it requires a new VM.

Regards

Blair

Hi Blair,

> No, the Dolphin VM is being "over friendly" and relinquishing its GUI
thread
> timeslice due to an unexpected interaction between InputState's message
> dispatch loop (in Smalltalk) and the overlapped call mechanism in the VM.
> Normally this has no effect on Dolphin, but when the CPU is being hogged
(or
> both CPUs are being hogged on a dual CPU machine) GUI update will slow to
a
> crawl.
>
> In investigating this I discovered that this issue was introduced with
> version 3.0 (and in fact I think Bill may have reported it back then). It
> has been addressed for the next release, but is not easily patchable since
> it requires a new VM.

Interesting.  As an aside, this has me wondering if this or something
similar have been behind the file copy problem I was having, though I'm not
sure what would have been hogging the CPU in that case.  Also, the app
appeared to be truly deadlocked, and not merely crawling.  Anyway, those
freezeups stopped when I created a non-overlapped #copy:to:.  I never got a
reproduceable scenario out of it (short of turning it loose in an OR), but,
my pager stopped going off at odd hours when I made the change, so there was
something about overlapping the call that caused trouble.

I feel bad even asking this question, but, have you captured the now
long-fixed critical section and weak collection problems as unit tests?  My
only concern is that some of those process-synch problems might decide to
come back as a result of the fix.

Congratulations and thanks for finding it!

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]