Unexplained system crash

[ekanderson]

Was editing a sequence with find

1st find OK, and modified variable.

2nd find, DF highlighted the search string. System froze, no mouse, no keyboard. CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-DEL NOTHING.

ALT-Tab Nothing.

Had to do a hard system power off.

DFexpress 5.79A, priority realtime, WinXP latest updates, etc.

System rebooted, other than some lost data, DF seems fine.

????????????????????????????????

[AzeoTech]

Did you say priority RealTime? Did you boost it yourself? You really can't do that. It doesn't matter what the application. There's a reason Task Manager warns you about adjusting priorities. Once you are in real-time priority class, things in the GUI start to have priority levels that are higher than things that they depend on and who knows what happens (well, you get weird crashes). DAQFactory can run in RealTime priority class, but it has its own mode called Acquire Mode that does this properly. Acquire mode eliminates the GUI and thus avoids these issues and is the only way you should run DAQFactory in realtime priority class.

If you've managed to get DAQFactory or other apps for that matter to run in RealTime priority class by manually boosting the priority, you've just been lucky so far. DAQFactory is particular susceptable to not working in realtime class (in normal, non-acquire mode that is), because it boosts individual thread priorities high up within the priority class, where most apps leave their threads in the middle (normal priority).

Now, if you can reproduce this crash without manually changing the priority class, that's another story.

[ekanderson]

On some other post, I explained that I was getting unexplained time alignment mismatches on channels that had different number of readings in average column. And if I remember correctly the suggestion was to run DF in XP realtime.

I did that, and the misalignments problem has gone away (30+ hours of data collection).

Since I'm collecting data AND trying to get the whole thing to work the way I want it to..... At this time I cannot use Acquire mode. I'm almost to the point that I can transfer the application to another dedicated machine, but not quite. On it, I can follow your suggestion.

Thaniks

[AzeoTech]

I don't remember making that suggestion, but I have a short memory, so I'll take your word on it. If I did make the suggestion, it was not as a permanent solution, but rather a debugging tool. The fact that your problems went away when you boosted the DF priority suggests that there is something else running on your machine that is interfering with DAQFactory and when you boosted the priority, you made it so DAQFactory took priority over this other application.

Anyhow, you can certainly stay in realtime mode using the GUI if you don't want to chase down the root of your problem, but just be aware that this sort of thing will happen, so save often and backup often.

[ekanderson]

I was wrong. I had posted with a problem of channel times going kewacky, and mentioned that if I switched DF's priority to XP realtime that it seemed to solve the problem (at least for a period of 30+ hours).

bye the bye, would you demote me from "advanced user" to beginner+. I've barely scratched the surface of DF. I'll admit to being a programmer for 30+ years, but as far as DF is concerned, barely getting started.

thanks

[AzeoTech]

I still think its a symptom of something else going on your system that you should probably figure out. I'd start DF up in regular mode to reproduce the problem, then fire up Task Manager -> processes tab and start killing apps. Of course you don't want to kill any system apps (like alg.exe, csrss.exe, ctfmon.exe, explorer.exe, lsass.exe, svchost.exe, smss.exe and others) Use google to figure out what each one is. When the problem goes away, you know which other software is causing it.

I can't lower your user level. Its based on the number of posts.