Today lightning started to hang up thunderbird shortly after startup with 100% cpu, no I/O and constant memory usage. I verified the cause by deactivating it. Since this also happens with a completely different installation and a different server-side account, I suspect the server (owncloud) sends something awkward. I read about debugging a thunderbird extensions using the firefox tools, but I cannot connect the debugger, since the main drawing thread is blocked (and thus the connection cannot be accepted). The error console seems to be empty.
Is there any other known strategy to debug a running thunderbird/lightning app? Can I dump the js state? Log all lightning actions to the console? Any other idea to pinpoint the culprit?
You can use the remote debugging capabilities to capture a profile. This should be working even if most things are hanging, but from what you wrote it seems you've tried. If the problem is that you cannot access the dialog that asks to accept the connection, you can set a few devtools prefs to auto-accept connections. I believe this is devtools.debugger.prompt-connection which needs to be set to false.
Regarding logging, you can enable calendar.debug.log and calendar.debug.log.verbose in the advanced config editor. You can then set XRE_CONSOLE_LOG to output the console to a file. There is a page (although not official, or at least outdated) on debugging xulrunner apps. This pretty much applies to Thunderbird too.
You may also be lucky in contacting the Lightning maintainer to discuss debugging this, he is available on irc.mozilla.org #calendar and is named Fallen.
Related
I apologize but I don't know the official name of the system I'm referring to, here is a screen shot showing the dialogs (note: Don't confuse "Shell" w/ Windows Shell, in this case "Shell" is the name of the my process that is crashing):
Two questions:
What is the name of the system/technology shown in the screen shot? Not the application that is crashing, but the system that is handling the crash, collecting the dump file and sending it.
If I have an application that for some reason I can't handle or catch all exceptions for, is there a way to redirect the sending of the crash data to a recipient I specify? Or register a handler or something? For example, if it were my application crashing and the user clicks the ''Send information'' button can I send that info to my email address or some other endpoint?
Most of your question has already been answered by #HansPassant:
That is the WER dialog, the crash activated Windows Error Reporting. A component written by Microsoft, it sends crash info to a server in Redmond. Microsoft uses it to fix the kind of bugs that they can fix. But most likely in your case it is your bug, they won't fix it. But you can get the info that WER gathered about it by following these guidelines.
Note that you need a code signing certificate to complete the registration and you need a few extra steps to identify your application. You'll only get small dumps (< ~1 MB), which sometimes don't help (often don't help for .NET).
#HansPassant also pointed out how to handle a crash yourself:
Or you create your own service, that must get started with SetUnhandledExceptionFilter() so you get the crash info before WER does.
However, there are a few more options to get the dump:
there is a Registry key called LocalDumps, which you can use to save dumps on a local disk. Please consider turning that on only if you need it, otherwise it'll easily fill your customer's hard disk. This works very fine if the crash is reproducible at the customer's site but not on your machine.
use a free library like CrashRpt (open source; please check the license) or Doctor Dump. This perhaps has the disadvantage that you need to set up a server to collect the data.
see more options which I described in the answer How do I take a good crash dump for .NET, which also works well for native applications.
I want to make a windows application whose GUI will be streamed to another device (allowing remote control). The point is that I'm not willing to rely on creating Windows Sessions to isolate the GUI I/O's (1)
To achieve this, I started observing some existing solutions that are able to enable remote access using this premise to see if I could get a clue about where to start.
One of these solution is Winflector (BTW: it is free up to 2 connections).
I got interested in this solution because it seems (I'm guessing) it detects only the repainted regions. What I took from my observations are that:
While the streamed application is "invisibly" running locally in the same session I'm logged in (it shows the application process in my task manager), the application window seems not to be created anyhow - at least Inspect can't get any window information/handle of the application process - It looks like sort of a "GUI StdOut Redirection".
Apparently, no additional Desktop is created;
Also apparently, no Mirror Driver is installed;
Using Process Explorer, I found out Winflector adds some thread's to the original application process. I suspect it is about the GUI redirection (by the thread's names);
The application is started by the Winflector server - that is, it has control about the CreateProcess arguments.
What is the most likely technique to be used in this case?
Windows Hook?
Windows Messages interception?
Special Display Driver?
Sort of Memory Device Context?
Where should I start researching to get a similar approach? Any open source project regarding this subject would also be very welcomed.
PS: By my programming experience, this is sort of a whole "new world" - sorry if my questions are redundant/obvious/non-sense.
(1) That is, this application could be spawned, streamed and interact
with the remote client using the same session which a local user is
already logged in, without conflicting the IO (like a regular VNC
would do, for example). PS: At this moment, I'm focusing only at the
output.
I need some "light" to get a solution. Probably there are tons of things that cause this problem, but maybe somebody could help me.
Scenario: a Windows server running 24/7 a PostgreSQL database and others server applications (for processing tasks on database, etc...). There are differents servers scenarios (~30), with different hardware and windows versions (XP SP3/ WinServer, etc... all NT based). All aplications were written in Delphi7, and link to DLLs (in D7 also).
After some days (sometimes a week, sometimes a couple of months), Windows begins to act strange, like not opening start menu, some buttons are missing in dialogs. And soon some applications do not open, raising a event on eventviewer:
Faulting application x, version y, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.1.2600.5781, fault address 0x00012afb
In mean while, others applications open fine, like notepad, iexplore, etc... but SOME of my applications don't, with only event log described above. But if we do not restart system, in a few days even cmd.exe stops open, (and all other applications) with same error on eventlog.
I've tried to find 'what' can cause this, but with no sucess. So, and any advice will be welcome.
Thanks in advance.
I think you are running out of resource handles (Window handles). You can verify this by having a look at the system properties in Sysinternals Process Explorer (a better task manager). I think even the default task manager can help out to display a handle count. Then you can identify which application is causing the trouble.
Once you know the application leaking and if it is yours, you can use Rational purify or Boundschecker to drill down to the problem. If you do not have money for these tools you will have to reduce the problem manually a bit by deactivating some features for example and see if the handle count still increases...
Not sure if it is the problem you are experiencing maybe it is completely unrelated. But easy to check. The track is that some app is stealing some global resources as you experience trouble with other applications. Applications like notepad do not use much resources so appear to work fine, heavy apps are more likely to show up the trouble.
Hope it helps.
For my work, I need to create a service that will detect an abnormal program termination and, instead of displaying a message to the user (default behavior), send the generated core dump to a remote server.
I'm pretty sure this can be done, but I have absolutely no clue on where to start. Is there any API/registry settings for this ?
Thank you.
One method is to install an Unhandled Exception Filter and then write a minidump from it which you can then upload to some place of your choosing. I wouldn't totally disregard Windows Error Reporting -- that's an addition to any crash reporting of your own. If your application is for public release then registering for Windows Error Reporting is well worthwhile as you get information about which crashes users are encountering in the wild and when crashes have been fixed you can add a response code to point them to a new version or other relevant information.
Another tool that may be useful depending on how your application is deployed in your organisation is to run Adplus on a user's machine which will collect together crash dumps. This is more useful for one-off crashes that seem to affect an individual user but aren't reproducible in a development environment.
Some other useful links:
http://www.debuginfo.com/articles/effminidumps.html - some useful sample code
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/debug/postmortemdebug_standalone1.aspx
It seems my question was either obvious or stupid (both ?) but anyway, i found some interesting pages after some researches.
Here are the links I found useful:
Track application crashes and disable Windows Error Reporting at the same time!
Disable error reporting
We've been plagued for several years by occasional reports from customers about a non-descript error message "Cannot set allocations" that appears on startup of our app. We have never been able to reproduce the problem in our own test environments so far. I have now run out of ideas for attempting to track this down. Here's a collection of observations that have accumulated over time:
Error message text reads "Cannot set allocations" (note absence of punctuation).
The window title simply reads "Error" (or the localized equivalent).
The "Cannot set allocations" text is always in English regardless of OS locale.
I have so far not been able to locate the DLL or EXE containing the message text.
Google is chock full of reports of this error for a variety of different products - but no solutions.
The only unifying aspect between the affected products I could make out so far was that they all appear to come in the form of DLLs that load into third-party processes (such as addins for Visual Studio or Windows Explorer shell extensions).
Our app is actually a shareware COM-addin for MS Outlook, written in Delphi (i.e. native code - no .NET).
The prime suspect in our case is the third-party licensing wrapper that we're using which decrypts and uncompresses our DLL into memory on the fly. Obviously I couldn't simply give an unprotected version of our app to the affected customers to verify this suspicion. Maybe the other vendors that this has been reported against are using similar products.
Debug versions of the protection wrapper supplied to us by the licensing vendor yielded no results: The log files looked exactly the same as from sessions where the error did not occur. Apparently the "inner" DLL gets decrypted and uncompressed all right but for some reason still fails to get loaded by the host process.
By creating an unprotected "loader" DLL we have been able to pinpoint the occurrence of the error somewhere behind the LoadLibrary call that is supposed to load our DLL into memory.
Extensive logging and global exception hooks in our own code (both the unprotected loader and the protected "core"-DLL) yielded no results at all. The error is obviously raised somewhere else.
The problem described in this earlier question of mine was very probably prompted by the same issue. This was before we created the unprotected loader stub.
The error only occurs at about 1-2% of our customers - whereas typically all installations at any affected customer's site are affected the same.
Sometimes the error goes away after we release a new version but often it will come back again after a couple of weeks or months.
Once the error has started to occur on a machine it does so consistently.
The error never occurs while connected to the affected machine via remote access (e.g. VNC, RDP, TeamViewer, etc.) and none of the affected customers are within travel distance from us so all we have to go by is log files and "eye-witness reports".
One customer reported that the error message dialog apparently was non-modal, i.e. he was able to simply move the dialog box to the side and continue working with the application (minus the functionality that our DLL would have provided). Not sure whether this is universally true in all other occurrences, too.
In some cases customers have been able to permanently rid themselves of the error by disabling or uninstalling other addins from other vendors that were sharing the host application with our own product.
The error has so far been observed on Windows XP, Vista and 7.
During the last few weeks we had a surge of reports from Outlook 2003 / Windows 7 users. Could the situation have been made worse by a recent Windows/Office-update?
Does anyone have any experience with this error at all?
Or any more ideas for investigating this?
I have only recently had this happen, which prompted my search and I ended up here. I can tell you that with me for sure it is in windows 7 home premium BUT ONLY WITH IE9 (which I hate by the way) it reduces the user back to the dummy stage and assumes that we have to be repeated flagged about everything.It will keep asking you if you want to disable add ons to speed up load times but usually on things that aren't really the things slowing the browser down in the first place,it is there is too much garbage loading in the first place.But back to the "Cannot set allocations", I for one have never expirianced it in any other browser which is not to say it doesn't happen with them.
This is going to be pure guess-work, but it sounds like maybe your third-party licensing software is trying to load your DLL at a particular location in memory, which - on these failing systems - happens to already be occupied by something else, perhaps a global hook DLL.
If you have a customer who is willing to work with you a bit, it might shed some light on the situation to get a crash dump (e.g., with ADPlus or maybe simpler with Sysinternals' ProcDump) when the error message is showing. That would show what modules are loaded and possibly the callstack (if it is from a message box at the time of the error as opposed to one that is catching an exception after the problem).
I also have experienced the "Cannot set allocations" issue. Royal pain. I had disabled Java, since I did not seem to need it, I used add/remove programs to remove Java from my system. Then I stated to get those errors. I have reinstalled, but disabled Java in IE explorer. Now I do not get the error anymore. Not a programmer, don't know why this happened. Maybe a clue for someone.
Win 7 - 64bit OS IE Explorer 10. Hope this helps someone figure this out. John
I've seen this happen. In my case a global hook dll created a large memory file mapping, perhaps to the memory the licensing dll was counting on.
I see "Cannot set Allocations" when I open google chrome only. Also after that, chrome closes with a msg saying "Whoa chrome has crashed..."
Still no solution :(
Also not a programmer, but it always happens when I open Chrome. It opens second window with error message 'cannot set allocation'. I usually close it and go on my way. if i don't it usually causes a crash. doesnt happen on any other browsers.