[Newbies] squeak locks up on windows / help me debug it...

[Cameron Sanders]

I thought the Pharo base image (3.10 with a few fonts & Balloon3d added)
running on Windows was looking pretty stable. But after an hour of editing
code --an hour since the last save-Squeak has abandoned me. It is
unresponsive. 

Trying both control and alt in combination with '.', 'l' (lower case L),
'c', does nothing apparently useful. I tried a few other weird combos I
thought I saw, but nothing visibly changed.

 

The process stack reported by Vista shows it to be incurring page-faults
like mad. [OK, that has subsided while I typed this email.] My machine has 4
GB of RAM, I am running two instances of internet-explorer, and I have
turned off the Windows search-indexing service. I know Vista has a
guess-the-next-program pre-loader that could be a little overzealous in
displacing programs from RAM. but still. it seems like this 101MB program
shouldn't generate any page faults when the other two leading memory pigs
are using less than double that much virtual memory. Vista's Resource
Monitor claims I am using only 43% of physical memory. The page-fault count
for Squeak.exe doubled while I typed this message.

 

When I click the Squeak icon on the window frame of the running copy (upper
left on Windows), I do see the menu for VM Preferences. It shows me the menu
and allows me to invoke actions. It will allow me to toggle the "Show output
console" on and off. The output console shows me changes to memory (as I
have that option checked). I can use my mouse wheel to scroll this console.
Control-'.' and Control-c (and lower case L) in this console do not change
anything. 

 

After mucking around in the console area, I am now getting "WARNING: event
buffer overflow" just moving my mouse around in squeak. After turning the
console off, the pointer is now invisible except when you click. It appears
that the overall squeak window is repainting itself properly.

 

-- Help me debug it

 

I have an interest in building a commercial application in Squeak. The FAQs
says squeak is stable. Given the active community of developers (including
The Great Ones), I imagine that it is stable, and that I am just doing
something dumb. repeatedly. However, for Squeak to be adopted more broadly,
it can't go zombie on users, even when the user does something dumb. That's
an absolute.

 

What is the longest uptime a squeak image has ever endured (while doing
something useful)? Which version was that and on what platform?

 

So I am willing to work to help make squeak more robust, but as a complete
newbie with it, I need much guidance. So right now, with this hung-up image,
what should I do? Should I attach to it with gdb? And if so, then what? [If
the internal process control is working, I won't be able to make heads or
tales out of it from gdb, right?]  Or can I launch another squeak and send
it a signal in some way [is it listening?]? What is most useful in this
case?

 

[Is there a way in Windows/Vista to signal an app so as to force a core
dump?]

 

Thanks in advance,

Cam

PS: I want to emphasize that I do not care about the code lost in this
particular instance (it was tutorial code), instead I am looking for a
stable free development environment. and I'm willing to help make one.

 

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