Revision Question

Dolphin 5.1 crashed on a "Launcher Error" when doing a database test.  My
error report to Microsoft was accepted.  Does Object-Arts receive and act on
these automated error reports eventually?

Kirk,

> Dolphin 5.1 crashed on a "Launcher Error" when doing a database test.  My
> error report to Microsoft was accepted.  Does Object-Arts receive and act
on
> these automated error reports eventually?

We don't receive them.

Best Regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> wrote
>
> > Dolphin 5.1 crashed on a "Launcher Error" when doing a database test.
My
> > error report to Microsoft was accepted.  Does Object-Arts receive and
act
> > on these automated error reports eventually?
>
> We don't receive them.
>
What address if any do you want Dolphin users to send these environmental
errors to?  And what do you want more than a screen-capture copy of the MS
error report?  Or is there some way of getting a text file of it?

Kirk,

If you want free support then this newsgroup is the place to get it, as
detailed on our Support page at:

http://www.object-arts.com/Support.htm

To be honest, posting the crash information from the MS error report is very
unlikely to be any help at all. A better idea is to configure the Dolphin
crash dump facility and post the salient parts of this dump (which will be
written out when Dolphin experiences a crash like the one you report above).
You can read about crash dumps here:

http://www.object-arts.co.uk/wiki/html/Dolphin/CrashDump.htm

Note that the crash dump is configured by default and will write the dump to
a file named Dolphin.ERRORS in the image directory. The crash dumps can be
very large so it is best to make sure that the file is empty before you run
your test (since each violation appends information to the file).

Obviously, being free, the newgroup is answered by Dolphin users or us at
Object Arts on a voluntary baiss. The alternative, if you wish to be sure
that someone will take a look at your problem, is to pay for support. As
indicated on our Support page we offer a "Per Incident Support" option which
guarantees that we will spend some time (typically up to 2 hours) looking at
your issue and will bump it towards the front of the priority queue. Even
so, we can't always guarantee to come up with a solution and the efficacy of
this process will be dependent almost entirely on whether you can supply us
with enough information to reproduce the problem ourselves (ideally a
failing SUnit test).

Remember too, that just because your database access violates inside Dolphin
this doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is with Dolphin itself. It
could quite easily be caused by a problem in the database drivers or
anything else that is running inside the same process.

Regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support

"Andy Bower" <[hidden email]> wrote
> If you want free support then this newsgroup is the place to get it, as
> detailed on our Support page at:
>
> http://www.object-arts.com/Support.htm

Since the Dolphin dump is over 97MB it appears posting the dump won't work.

This error was generated with an object database in Smalltalk code, not
accessing any external database except for MSWindow's file system. We were
trying to overcome the 2GB file size barrier by using multiple files.
Several 1.7GB files were generated in the process. And system memory
available to run Dolpin 5.1 Pro is half a gigabyte.  So a 97MB dump is
reasonable.

> A better idea is to configure the Dolphin
> crash dump facility and post the salient parts of this dump (which will be
> written out when Dolphin experiences a crash like the one you report
above).

Have you any suggestions as to how to determine which parts of the dump are
"salient?"  Perhaps that could help us discover the error.

Thanks.

> This error was generated with an object database in Smalltalk code, not
> accessing any external database except for MSWindow's file system. We were
> trying to overcome the 2GB file size barrier by using multiple files.
> Several 1.7GB files were generated in the process. And system memory
> available to run Dolpin 5.1 Pro is half a gigabyte.  So a 97MB dump is
> reasonable.

You might be hitting OS limitations.  Otherwise, I recently read something
(sorry, don't remember where) about a VW based project that ended up
dropping strings in favor of symbols to reduce size.  How much of the many
gigs is in memory at one time?  If it's a lot, can you do more with
on-demand access and let things swap out when not in use?  OTOH, if OA wants
to step up with "Dolphin should be able to handle that" and offer
improvements for large collections, etc., I won't be upset :)


> > A better idea is to configure the Dolphin
> > crash dump facility and post the salient parts of this dump (which will
be
> > written out when Dolphin experiences a crash like the one you report
> above).
>
> Have you any suggestions as to how to determine which parts of the dump
are
> "salient?"  Perhaps that could help us discover the error.

A great Goodie might be something that presents a debugger-like view of
crash dumps.  I'd gladly settle for seeing current-image code for any
methods referenced in the dump.

Have a good one,

Bill

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

"Bill Schwab" <[hidden email]> wrote
> You might be hitting OS limitations. Otherwise, I recently read something
> (sorry, don't remember where) about a VW based project that ended up
> dropping strings in favor of symbols to reduce size.

My programmer wrote: "The main error, as it seems to me, was connected with
overflow of object table, because error appeared when I created many small
objects (LongInt). But I found, that on one machines (on Windows 2000
Server) had no such error."

Does sound like an OS limitation but there was a work-around:

"I corrected the error fully by use PageIndex as correspondence table but
not BTree. Thanks to this I 'm saved of creation many small objects. I
tested it with transaction up to 10 GB."

> How much of the many gigs is in memory at one time?

About 70Mb.

> OTOH, if OA wants to step up with "Dolphin should be able to handle that"
> and offer improvements for large collections, etc., I won't be upset :)

Me neither!  Perhaps this experience will provide an implementation idea to
OA.

A great Goodie might be something that presents a debugger-like view of
crash dumps.  I'd gladly settle for seeing current-image code for any
methods referenced in the dump.

Whew!  As dumps can grow to many megs, it would be a great idea.

Thanks to Andy & Bill for your input.

Kirk

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 14:04:50 -0400, "Bill Schwab"
<[hidden email]> wrote:

Interesting. That might be the reason why the database classes in
ObjectStudio return Symbols from SQL queries instead of Strings.
But I wonder, how does dropping Strings in favour of Symbols help to
reduce size? Is it maybe just because Symbols are guaranteed to be
unique across an image when they contain the exact same sequence of
characters?

Regards,
Paul

> >You might be hitting OS limitations.  Otherwise, I recently read
something
> >(sorry, don't remember where) about a VW based project that ended up
> >dropping strings in favor of symbols to reduce size.
>
> Interesting. That might be the reason why the database classes in
> ObjectStudio return Symbols from SQL queries instead of Strings.
> But I wonder, how does dropping Strings in favour of Symbols help to
> reduce size? Is it maybe just because Symbols are guaranteed to be
> unique across an image when they contain the exact same sequence of
> characters?

AFAIK, that's the idea: a built-in flyweight pattern.

Have a good one,

Bill

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