@Boot_WB

So many posts, and many ideas. First, I have to clarify some things :

I used my Sam occasionaly during the past 2 years (about twice a month) just to install new programs, updates, etc. so I couldn`t track a freeze down to a specific task. What usually happened was lots of DSI errors (some ignored, others reboot). The important thing is that I spent 2-3 hours most at the time and I had to hard reset the machine using the button every now and then.

To the present time : I have the chance to use my Miggy on a daily basis now, and It`s been only a couple of weeks since the last update so I`ll have to testify my experience regarding these freezes:

On classic (A4000, CV3D, OS4.1.3) there was a system lockup in low memory. I understand that has lower transfer speed and disc access, but it was unusable. So I was forced to reset.

On Sam, the lockups were occasionaly but frustrating. Some examples:
-The mouse & KB froze for no apparent reason (not dead, the mouse LED is on, so the USB stack is running), the disc was ok (access Led lit), WB stalled.
-Mouse & KB frozen, but WB tasks continue to work (limpid clock working fine)

Probable (different) causes:
I noticed 100% CPU usage while the system was stalled (a dockie! Should I leave it or disable it?).
The memory runs low after a long time (MUIOWB,many hours later), but there is still plenty of it.

I have to specify that after the update, the DSI errors are rare, so the freeze is temporary (depends on the task that has taken over the system).
The OS has improved a lot but seems not to prioritize interactivity, if something happens input has to wait.

It would be nice to have always top priority on input device and a way to kill anything else that could stall the system (like the task manager)

P.S. Waiting for something to finish and then be able to move mouse and launch Exorcist or SCOUT isn`t ideal.

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@itix

Quote:

I wonder, how do you know it is OK if you don't run any 3rd party programs? The software is always buggy. But is it always 3rd party software only?

:) I found point of tonyw sounds like "os4 is perfect and absolutly clean, and have no bugs at all. Other ones who report about problems are heretics, because os4 are absolutly and ultra stable and bug-free os". Sounds a bit funny :)

Dunno how he can say that OS is ok, if he dont stress is much ? And only real stressing, its real-life and 3d party programms.

I to be honest never understand that strange agenda, about "writing bug-free programms, and then OS will never crashes". Its wellknown that no single apps are bug-free, and there will be always bugs everythere, all the time. And OS should workoround all of this, and make a feel that everything perfect. Even with buggy programms (i.e. any programm which do more than just hello-world).

Last edited by kas1e on 09-Jan-2012 at 11:00 AM.

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@Cass

Thanks for the info :o)

As Spectre660 pointed out, it may be worth putting a vnc server into your WBStartup drawer to see if the system can be accessed remotely (ie if the system has not frozen per se, but the USB stack is not monitoring/processing mouse activity correctly). If so, then this would allow you to identify the task which is taking up all CPU cycles at least... although I would expect display/mouse pointer updates over VNC to be agonisingly slow if CPU is already at 100% - you may have to play around with the priority of the VNC server in order to make this work.

Input device should already be running at the highest priority afaiu. To quote Dave Haynie:
Quote:

AmigaOS fundamentally doesn't lock up when overloaded, doesn't stutter in audio even when overloaded, doesn't get a jittery mouse, etc. I might expect those web browser windows to redraw slowly if the system were overloaded in CPU, but Intuition should always run at a higher priority, along with the whole UI event chain.

(NB He was talking about poor performance of MorphOS UI under low VMem conditions at the time)

I wouldn't expect that disabling the dockie would free up much resource tbh, and at least if it is running you can see that WB hasn't locked up completely (and also dismiss the graphics lock suggested by NutsAboutAmiga as being the cause).

Regards



Rich

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@Boot_WB

Dave Haynie is completely wrong on that. Audio stutters when system is overloaded and mouse pointer is not moving smoothly. Input.device is running only at priority +20 and tasks can at any point disable multitasking and interrupts or use slow interrupt code.

Had that effect on my Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200. Using custom copper list and dragging screen is good way to drain system resources. Play some 12x speed SID tune on Amiga 500 and it locks up

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@tonyw

Quote:

I don't have third-party add-ons because I'm testing and developing OS4, not third-party programs.

What about contributions? For that matter, what about contributions that are installed along with the OS, say Unarc and it's dependants which can crash on particular files?

Quote:

In every case the problem has been the HD dying.

Usually one would get a read error in this case. And on my system a bad HD has caused a slowdown usually accompanied by strange noises.

But other things can freeze OS4 such as the memory system being over stressed and not geared to handle it plus not being equipped to handle a low VRAM situation.

Then there are times when all input devices go dead for no reason except for the mouse being moved. This is popular on my machine. So far it remains unsolved.

Quote:

I hear (but have not observed) that OWB-MUI suffers from crashes and has memory leaks.

I can confirm that is does crash. Since it came out I have given it extenisve testing and it has crahsed on a number of sites. Unfortunately GR doesn't record what sites they were nor can I C&P from the URL when it has crashed so I have a load of crash logs I saved but don't know what caused them.

Quote:

In short: No, OS4 does not crash.

What's considered OS4? The ScreenBlanker of both Update 3 and 4 are buggy. On 3 it can freeze the system and on 4 the blanker can freeze itself. Are these add ons?

Also, the Update 3 USB2 driver can crash. AFAIK that was part of the OS. So if a USB2 driver is part of the OS then the OS does indeed crash. Being fixed currently does not take away the "guilt."

Quote:

Better still: Get a serial cable

I've tried this. But unless you have preset a high debug level and can reproduce the crash somehow it isn't much help. It's like expecting to see a coloured ice cream and all you got was vanilla.

Last edited by Hypex on 09-Jan-2012 at 01:53 PM.

@itix

"Audio stutters when system is overloaded and mouse pointer is not moving smoothly"

It depends on the overload type. Things like 600% CPU load does not affect at all, but things like 700 wb clocks on screen (on 68060/50) put my A4000 down (mouse stutters and input is dead, do not remember what happened to mods playing).

AOS3.x system could have the 600% load + intensive swap use without any noticeable effect on interface responsiveness etc... But surely that needed manual setups and extra tools.

@thread
PPC SoC's often have watchdog, perhaps it could be used to bring system safely down or back to sanity. (also SAM FPGA and xena might give further possibilities to reach to execSG when other I/O is dead)

Last edited by KimmoK on 09-Jan-2012 at 02:15 PM.

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@kas1e

Quote:

:) I found point of tonyw sounds like "os4 is perfect and absolutly clean, and have no bugs at all. Other ones who report about problems are heretics, because os4 are absolutly and ultra stable and bug-free os". Sounds a bit funny :) Dunno how he can say that OS is ok, if he dont stress is much ? And only real stressing, its real-life and 3d party programms.

+1

One who only have OS4 components and never install any 3rd party apps or libs will never be able to run out of memory to begin with, so how on earth could you, tonyw, ever know if OS4 can handle a low mem situation for example?! Only thing would be to fill up the RAM disk. But that somehow "should" cause a freeze according to ssolie on hyp forum. Strange.

Try actually using your Amiga for once and see how far you get.

About MUI-OWB: It has bugs, and it does leak memory. And even if it doesn't leak, it caches everything forever and never frees any RAM until you quit. So when using MUI-OWB it is necessary to watch the RAM. When it gets low - quit and restart will give you back some 100-300MB RAM. The first sign of low mem is that images isn't loading. Usually by that time it's too late to save the machine (with update 3 & 4) because some data would already have been swapped out and will cause a freeze when retrieved.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

Well back in the old days it was common to get red guru meditation, you don't get that

I got one last week on OS 4.1.4, it's still in there, as are the yellow ones, seen them several times over the years on os4, only unlike os3 there is no way to resume from them.

@danwood

Quote:

danwood wrote: @NutsAboutAmiga Quote: Well back in the old days it was common to get red guru meditation, you don't get that I got one last week on OS 4.1.4, it's still in there, as are the yellow ones, seen them several times over the years on os4, only unlike os3 there is no way to resume from them.

Yes you should not use the Yellow Guru meditation

I wonder way no one has patched this stupid alert box thing yet, yes it happens but not so often, I guess that’s way no one has patched that stupid thing yet.

It should be easy to create a service; that keeps track of the alert messages.

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@Cass

Disable it. This is one that totally locks me up for some reason.
Have not had time to try tp isolate why .

Quote:

Cass wrote: @Boot_WB Probable (different) causes: I noticed 100% CPU usage while the system was stalled (a dockie! Should I leave it or disable it?). .

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@Deniil715

Quote:

About MUI-OWB: It has bugs, and it does leak memory. And even if it doesn't leak, it caches everything forever and never frees any RAM until you quit. So when using MUI-OWB it is necessary to watch the RAM. When it gets low - quit and restart will give you back some 100-300MB RAM. The first sign of low mem is that images isn't loading. Usually by that time it's too late to save the machine (with update 3 & 4) because some data would already have been swapped out and will cause a freeze when retrieved.

About bugs, maybe in the old webkit revision and/or OS4 port. :)

About leaks, it's not about image/font/script caching. These elements are cached up to a given limit (which depends on available memory, generally 64MB for 512/1GB machines) after which it's released progressively (you can press F12 to see the state of cached objects in debuglog).

The actual memory leaks are in the javascriptcore engine, and it's actually more to do with the way WebKit handles virtual memory. Basically, they reserve lots of memory space, but don't commit to it right away. And the address space is not necessarily released either (MEM_RESERVE vs MEM_RESERVE | MEM_COMMIT with VirtualAlloc for the Windows API, for instance). But they don't care too much about that, since they usually have OSes with per-process address space (although Apple cared a bit and made Safari 64bits, to deal with a relatively common >4GB allocated address space :)).

As you can guess, on amiga OSes, it's equivalent to allocating the address space, globally, and there's not much to do about it. But as a test, if you disable javascript, you'll see OWB/WebKit almost doesn't leak at all (assuming OS4 can display properly free memory without being disturbed by its own slab allocator caching thing).

And before someone praises FireFox instead, it has the same behaviour about memory handling, eating lots of virtual space.

And finally, when you quit, you should get back all the memory back, assuming your malloc implementation uses mempools. If it doesn't, you won't, or course.

And by the way, i don't see why OS4 crashes/freezes when using the swap. How useful is that, exactly?

Last edited by Fab on 09-Jan-2012 at 04:25 PM.
Last edited by Fab on 09-Jan-2012 at 04:23 PM.
Last edited by Fab on 09-Jan-2012 at 04:20 PM.

@Fab

Quote:

About bugs, maybe in the old webkit revision and/or OS4 port. :)

Of course :) I'm not talking about your current MOS version.

Quote:

And finally, when you quit, you should get back all the memory back, assuming your malloc implementation uses mempools. If it doesn't, you won't, or course.

I do, unless the JS engine has leaked in a way that isn't recoverable. Quitting and restarting pretty much always saves the day. It would however be nice with some form of cache flush function in case I have a lot of tabs open and stuff and don't want to quit just yet...

Quote:

And by the way, i don't see why OS4 crashes/freezes when using the swap. How useful is that, exactly?

It is obviously buggy. I mean, it freeze long before it can't swap out any more memory. And even if it would come to that limit (like all remaining memory is locked) it should of course return NULL like it has always done instead of freezing. It worked quite well in update 2, but not in update 3 or 4.

In update 2 it could quite obviously swap out at least 100-150MB (of my 512MB) before it basically grinded to a halt, not froze. I could still move that mouse at this point but not much else. With update 3 and 4 it seems to swap like 10-20 megs at most, then when this memory is freed (quitting OWB), or when swapped out memory is accessed (as when opening the iconified YAM or something) the machine freezes. Not very useful. but it's apparently a feature, not a bug

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@Deniil715

Quote:

It is obviously buggy. I mean, it freeze long before it can't swap out any more memory. And even if it would come to that limit (like all remaining memory is locked) it should of course return NULL like it has always done instead of freezing. It worked quite well in update 2, but not in update 3 or 4. In update 2 it could quite obviously swap out at least 100-150MB (of my 512MB) before it basically grinded to a halt, not froze. I could still move that mouse at this point but not much else. With update 3 and 4 it seems to swap like 10-20 megs at most, then when this memory is freed (quitting OWB), or when swapped out memory is accessed (as when opening the iconified YAM or something) the machine freezes. Not very useful. but it's apparently a feature, not a bug

:) And after that, some of os4 users will say "but aos4 have virtual memory!" , while they do not know that its only swapping, which broken, and authors call it as normal , and explain why it normal , and even that it should be like this (and will be). I.e. like tonyw says "os4 have no bugs and never freeze"

Last edited by kas1e on 10-Jan-2012 at 12:02 PM.

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lockups day for me, it seems.

After fresh reboot, I drag .txt file to notepad and launch mui-owb to background.
After editing the text file a few minutes the system freezes.
Also caps lock light "froze".

(forgot to check if CPU meter or clock worked)

USB devices removal and re-connection did not help, had to do hard reset.

With only notepad in use, I managed to avoid the freezing.


Running SAM440ep & u3.

Last edited by KimmoK on 11-Jan-2012 at 12:57 PM.
Last edited by KimmoK on 11-Jan-2012 at 12:57 PM.

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@KimmoK

Quote:

Running SAM440ep & u3.

Update 3 was not so stable in general (because USB2 things i presume), why you didn't install Update 4 ?

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@KimmoK

Remove the CPU meter dockie and any others for a week or so and see if things lockup.


Quote:

KimmoK wrote: lockups day for me, it seems. After fresh reboot, I drag .txt file to notepad and launch mui-owb to background. After editing the text file a few minutes the system freezes. Also caps lock light "froze". (forgot to check if CPU meter or clock worked) USB devices removal and re-connection did not help, had to do hard reset. With only notepad in use, I managed to avoid the freezing. Running SAM440ep & u3.

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@samo79

I`ve found the possible culprit, a utility forgotten in the WBStartup...

I`ll have to test the system without it for some time and check back again.

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@Cass

Excellent! Glad to hear you have found a (possible) culprit.

Looking forward to hearing if this solves your stability issues

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