Crashes on Windows

Crashes on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

After months and months of rock-solid stability, my Emacs on Windows
(compiled daily from HEAD) is suddenly much more crash-prone, to the
tune of perhaps four or five crashes in less than two weeks.

Unfortunately, they are non-reproducible AFAICS; I wasn't doing the
same things when the crashes happened, though I think two of them were
while I find-file'd (with ido, but I don't think that's related).

As a blind shoot, I think the crashes could be related to the
canonicalization-of-strings patch, which was committed eleven days
ago, though I used it for weeks before with no problem whatsoever. In
any case, if the canonicalization patch is causing crashes, that will
surely mean there's a hidden problem or assumption that we should find
and fix.

So, to those of you who are using the Emacs trunk on Windows, two
comments: save often, and keep a watchful eye for any clue.

Thanks,
             Juanma

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Jason Rumney]

Juanma Barranquero wrote:
> After months and months of rock-solid stability, my Emacs on Windows
> (compiled daily from HEAD) is suddenly much more crash-prone, to the
> tune of perhaps four or five crashes in less than two weeks.
There was a brief period where changes in image.c caused a memory leak,
and on Windows a GDI resource leak (which caused crashes when the
resources allocated reached 9999, after 5-10 minutes of typical use for
me). But that was fixed more than a week ago, and was more of a problem
on other branches where the fix wasn't merged for until this weekend
just gone.

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 6/19/07, Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> wrote:

> There was a brief period where changes in image.c caused a memory leak,
> and on Windows a GDI resource leak (which caused crashes when the
> resources allocated reached 9999, after 5-10 minutes of typical use for
> me). But that was fixed more than a week ago

I've had at least two crashes in the last week, so it must be something else.

             Juanma

Re: Crashes on Windows

[dhruva]

Hi,

On 6/19/07, Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've had at least two crashes in the last week, so it must be something else.

Have you tried capturing the process dump using "USERDUMP" utility
from MS? It can be configured to create a mini or a full dump on any
exception in a given process.

Link to userdump utility from MS:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e089ca41-6a87-40c8-bf69-28ac08570b7e&DisplayLang=en

It might make it much easier to debug with a full dump. If you are
doubting resource leaks or heap corruption, using the "gflags.exe"
(from the resource kit), you can enable extra information in the
dumps. USERDUMP also has an ability to collect heap information.
Since I have not seen a crash (I use Emacs only for editing C/C++
files), I am not able to analyze. For official work, we use USERDUMP
quite extensively.

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Crashes on Windows

[dhruva]

Hi,

On 6/20/07, dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> wrote:
> dumps. USERDUMP also has an ability to collect heap information.

It is DEBUGDIAG to get the leak information (not USERDUMP), apologies
for the wrong info.

MS link to DebugDiag:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=28bd5941-c458-46f1-b24d-f60151d875a3&DisplayLang=en

-dky

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 6/20/07, dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> wrote:

> It is DEBUGDIAG to get the leak information (not USERDUMP), apologies
> for the wrong info.

Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

As for gflags.exe, I don't have the resource kit.

             Juanma

Re: Crashes on Windows

[dhruva]

Hi,

On 6/20/07, Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> wrote:
> As for gflags.exe, I don't have the resource kit.

It is a free download from MS site. Depending on your OS, you can
download. it has some good tools for development (memtriage for leak
detection and kernrate as profiler). It is really worth having it on a
developers box.

-dky

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2007 08:33:42 +0530
> From: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>
> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> 
> On 6/19/07, Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I've had at least two crashes in the last week, so it must be something else.
> 
> Have you tried capturing the process dump using "USERDUMP" utility
> from MS? It can be configured to create a mini or a full dump on any
> exception in a given process.

I think it is much more efficient to use DrMingw configured as a JIT
debugger.  You get a meaningful traceback pinpointing the locus of the
crash at the source level.

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 6/20/07, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> I think it is much more efficient to use DrMingw configured as a JIT
> debugger.

I've just installed it. Let's see if I can find what's crashing my Emacs.

             Juanma

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Stephen Berman]

Update: After my last post in this thread on 15 Jun 2007 I continued
alternating between using the released Emacs 22.1 and the CVS trunk
builds from 4/30 and 6/3.  The latter continued to show increased
memory usage, the first two did not show this.  On 19 Jun 2007 Jason
Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org> wrote in other thread (see
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/73303):

> There was a brief period where changes in image.c caused a memory leak,
> and on Windows a GDI resource leak (which caused crashes when the
> resources allocated reached 9999, after 5-10 minutes of typical use for
> me). But that was fixed more than a week ago, and was more of a problem
> on other branches where the fix wasn't merged for until this weekend
> just gone.

On 6/30 I updated from CVS trunk to my current build, which I've used
daily since and have not experienced increased memory usage with it.
So I assume my build from 6/3 had the memory leak, which has since
been fixed.

Steve Berman

Re: Crashes on Windows

[Richard Stallman]

    On 6/30 I updated from CVS trunk to my current build, which I've used
    daily since and have not experienced increased memory usage with it.
    So I assume my build from 6/3 had the memory leak, which has since
    been fixed.

That is a relief.

Thanks for noticing it.