[squeak-dev] Re: [Pharo-project] VM crash on Windows

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Thu Mar 11 08:09:33 UTC 2010


On 3/10/2010 11:40 PM, Stéphane Ducasse wrote:
> did you not notice problem with the size of the log file with the appening behavior?
> Because I started to have a huge file where all the crashes reports were added one by one and I was wondering if
> on a server this may not be a problem (probably having a limit for the size of the report could be a good idea - but I do not know).

One a production server? Do the math: 1GB of disk space costs cents. One 
hour of two of your engineers trying to recreate the problem or recover 
the information costs a few hundred bucks. That's a ratio of 10000:1.

On our main server the size of the logs is 500MB going back six months 
or so when we reimaged it last. That's 0.1% of the disk space on the 
box. The other day we bought a few more TBs of cheap scratch storage 
which we use for throwaway VMs in QA (vmware VMs, not Squeak so it's 
20+GB each).

On a production server it makes no sense whatsoever to limit logging 
unless you're logging *excessively*. In an emergency the logs are all 
you have to find out what is going wrong, it's worth keeping them.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

>
> Stef
>
> On Mar 10, 2010, at 2:12 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
>
>> Andreas,
>>
>> I will give that a try.  I think it should be active by default, but it won't matter too much once I modify the shortcuts on a few boxes.  Other wish list items would be to have a similar option on Linux and to ensure that the contents of the log are concatenated vs. replaced with each crash.
>>
>> Thanks!!
>>
>> Bill
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: pharo-project-bounces at lists.gforge.inria.fr [mailto:pharo-project-bounces at lists.gforge.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Andreas Raab
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 12:32 AM
>> To: Pharo Development
>> Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] VM crash on Windows
>>
>> Hi Bill -
>>
>> If you have problems like these consider cross-posting to squeak-dev or vm-dev. I only check Pharo in irregular intervals.
>>
>> On 3/8/2010 4:27 PM, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:
>>> I am having a sudden problem with Pharo crashing on Windows - it's quitting on handling Seaside requests, and I'm getting **no** information.  The VM pops up the output console, writes a lot of (probably useful) information to it, and then promptly exits.
>>
>> The issue you're seeing is caused by a recursive MessageNotUnderstood error. You can easily recreate this by doing the following:
>>
>> ((ProtoObject subclass: #Bummerator
>> 	instanceVariableNames: ''
>> 	classVariableNames: ''
>> 	poolDictionaries: ''
>> 	category: 'Kernel-Objects')
>> 		superclass: nil;
>> 		new) bummer.
>>
>> The reason why that doesn't result in a regular crash.dmp is that the support code (which catches the crashes and writes the dump) isn't involved at all. The interpreter just quits.
>>
>> Contrast this with, say the result of an FFI crash:
>>
>> (ExternalLibraryFunction
>> 	name:'' module: '' callType: 0
>> 	returnType: ExternalType void argumentTypes: #())
>> 		setHandle: ((ExternalAddress new) at: 1 put: 1; yourself);
>> 		invoke
>>
>> This does generate a crash.dmp since the support code can catch the problem.
>>
>> However, to catch the former issue you can run the vm with -log:
>> <logfile>  which will contain the resulting output.
>>
>>> The rebuttal: if it has time/ability to write information all over part of the screen, it can open a file and make sure it leaves a trace of what happened.  Right?  The current vms (Windows and Linux) appear to be totally disinterested in logging crashes, and that needs to change.
>>
>> They do if you tell 'em to.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>    - Andreas
>>
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>



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