DDE has been particularly unstable today

HCL Domino Domino Forum
1

  • Earlier today DDE crashed doing something innocuous, like opening a subform. I don’t recall exactly, sadly, except it was quite unexpected doing something quite trivial.

  • But I relaunched and pressed on. Just now I double-clicked “Views” in the “Application” panel to show all Views, and DDE simply freaked. The “Application” panel lost all content except the little “Folder” icons along its left edge, and the top entry (“Forms” I think) had a little box around it, like an in-place edit, though I never clicked there. The main DDE window was utterly blank … not a single pixel of content anywhere.

  • So I closed DDE and relaunched it. Straight away the “Application” panel had a line about 1/4 of the way down, and it would never paint anything below that line, putting in scroll bars instead, like it thought the window ended there.

  • I clicked the little + next to Views to expand it, and the shorter incarnation of “Applications” reverted to all “Folder” icons and no text again, but I don’t recall DDE going blank. I clicked the little + again, and it went straight to the Twilight Zone.

  • I have two monitors, and DDE is on the second one; I never run anything maximized. I detest maximized windows. At this Twilight Zone point it put the “Application” panel on the left monitor, maximized, and it the Editor window on the right monitor, maximized. Not only that, but it would not allow me to navigate to other windows, like the Notes Client, or the browser I had open. Every pixel of every screen was devoted to DDE and would not allow anything else. Even the Task Bar didn’t work right … it would only paint the “Start” button … the rest of the bar was missing, or it was empty and the same color as what was there, so I couldn’t see it (including the system tray). If I launched something new using the “Start” button, it appeared on the screen until I did anything outside that window, when it vanished.

  • I had to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and call up Process Explorer, then kill all Notes processes. All “vanished” windows re-appeared, having been put under the spazzing DDE. My system appears to be normal, but I haven’t tried to use DDE yet.

  • The system claimed it created NSD for both instances, if those should be desired.

Thanks for your time…

2

Subject: what is your machine spec?

I am not discounting your issues in any way, but I spent the last week with DDE open in traditional Notes design elements without any issues. So a good start would be to list:

  • processor

  • memory

  • free space on the disk

  • os version and 32/64 ?

  • what else is running?

  • a screenshot of the performance tab in windows task manager

Something isn’t right and I think we can narrow it down …

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Subject: I’m with Maureen…

  • No GDI has always been a death knell for windoze, but XP runs out so infrequently that I don’t actively monitor it like I did under '98 and before, where as little as two applications would consume all GDI and lead to a crash. The NSD doesn’t seem to capture that value, at least labelled in a manner I could easily guess to search for, and recognize the result.

Thanks for your time…

4

Subject: I find XP is horrible for dev across the board

be it DDE, eclipse, RAD, and even VS.NET (2005, 2008, or 2010). Not sure if you can, but just an upgrade to Win 7 might make your experience better. If you can do a move to Win 7 64 bit (if you have enough ram) that will make it all the better. I know my laptop is not current for most enterprises (i5 540, 8 gigs ram, SSD drive, etc) but I never ever have speed or display issues with any IDE since the move.

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Subject: I’m sorry John, I can’t do that…

  • I had a big long rant in here, and though “no one really cares about that.”, so I deleted it. There is hope for me yet!

  • I’ve never had any stability issues with any IDE on XP, except for DDE, and I’ve used over a dozen, including Visual Studio. I’ve never had any slowness issues with any IDE on XP, except for DDE and the Blackberry JDE. Eclipse Ganymede runs fine as frog hair on this laptop, even with twenty other applications running. So my experience appears to differ from yours.

But thanks for the suggestion (grin)…

6

Subject: sounds like maybe out of GDI memory?

definitely very strange behavior. Would like to see the nsds, please send them to me if you can.

Killing all the Notes processes is a start, but have to wonder if a reboot would be best if something has eaten up all the GDI, a reboot is usually the easiest and best way to get it back.

Without nsds, out of gdi memory is just an educated guess, but we’ll see if the nsds yield a better idea.

thanks!

7

Subject: It just happened again…

  • This time I was running Notepad, Notes, DDE, and the normal little stuff I always run, like Yahoo Widgets to get a desktop clock, and the NT 4 Performance Monitor because the “new” one won’t run in a nicely compact tiny window (50x100px) like the NT 4 one will. No bloatware M$ office, virtual machines, or anything particularly memory or resource intensive.

  • The commonality between these two events is I’m editing a whole pile of Views. I’m adding an icon to a column, where document data drives the icon to display:

  1. Open a View.

  2. Click the icon column to show the Formula.

  3. Add a pair to the @if() block that tells the new icon to show.

  4. Save the View

Do this about thirty times.

  • Except it won’t do it more than a couple dozen before DDE spazzes out. On the premise it was GDI, when it happened I opened Process Explorer to have a look. That doesn’t indicate total GDI available. Neither does “task manager”. So I closed Notepad & Notes, minimized DDE, then restored it, and viola … there were still numerous rendering errors, but it was usably present, so I cleanly closed it, closed the other windows, and rebooted. This sure seems in line with GDI exhaustion.

  • I also searched the 'net for a GDI tool. NOTHING seems to show available GDI for XP. ALL of them show GDI object count on a per-process basis, which Process Explorer already does, but that doesn’t mean jack concerning availability of GDI. If you have or know of a tool that will show total GDI remaining I’ll be happy to run it, edit a pile of Views, and see if GDI “leaks”, which is what seems to be happening. Or something else you suggest.

Thanks for your time…

OS is XP Pro “Version 2002” SP3 critical updates yesterday.

Notes/DDE is R8.5.1FP3 running on the OS, not in a VM.

4 GB RAM with silly quantities remaining, running such a tiny number of applications.

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Subject: Never thought of GDI…

  • If this happens again I’ll peek at that. It also explains why relaunch didn’t fix it. Makes me feel like I shoulda thunk of that. (silly grin)

  • Files are outbound as I type.

Thanks for your time…

9

Subject: first crash was fixed in 852

the one about RegisterHandlers out of lsedtipc was fixed in the 8.5.2 stream.

Still working on analyzing the second one, it is less clear.

10

Subject: notes2.exe leaks GDI, badly…

  • I set Process Explorer to monitor GDI & USER for each process, then sorted by most usage, which put note2.exe at the top with 755 GDI.

  • Then I did my process of editing a View. During the edit it went to 850 GDI. After the save it jumped to 1143 GDI, but it never went back down to 755 like it was before the edit took place.

  • Edit the exact same View in the exact same manner it when it’s done it’s jumped to 1388 GDI, and it’s stuck there.

  • Again and it’s up to 1639 GDI, a fourth goes to 1894 GDI objects. I’d consider that repeatable. USER appears largely unaffected.

  • The wierd thing is why does it add 300 GDI objects on save? GDI is UI, not data store. But there it is.

Hope this helps…

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Subject: This has continued to climb all day…

  • Now notes2.exe has 2834 GDI and 579 USER. Notes.exe has 583 GDI and 786 USER. These two processes account for 2/3 of all GDI and just over half of all USER objects reported.

  • Hours after posting the above, notes2.exe is up to 5237 GDI and 753 USER, while notes.exe has 576/801. I’m thinking this has been an issue for some time, but XP has a large enough object table that it’s not noticeable until a View save snarfs up 300+ objects at a crack…

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Subject: Cool. I just bumped GDI up…

explains how to increase GDI on XP, and I set mine to 16383, one less than the maximum they state there.

  • Wikipedia also says that XP cannot report total GDI available, only how much each process consumes. Considering the system becomes unstable when this runs out, it seems more than a little short-sighted to have the ability to monitor it in '98, and strip it out in XP. There it is.

Thanks for your time…

  • Rags
13

Subject: hope that might help

it’s still just a guess so far. It’s just that when things start painting funny, GDI is the first thing I usually think about going wrong. If GDI is the cause, it could be anything from Designer itself to anything else running on the machine causing the problem :slight_smile: I’ll look more at the second NSD today - it may yet be something entirely different!