Determining cause of Windows 4D Client crash

[David Craig]

We have a customer whose 4D Client program crashes occassionaly but no
operating system alert appears when this happens. Crash happens after 4D
Client has run most of the day and the client prints a report. Other client
programs at this client site work fine and can print this report without
incident.

This is for 4D Client 6.7 runing under Windows.

What is the cause of this crash?

Can the Windows debugger (WinDbg) provide crash information? I looked at
Microsoft's web site about this debugger and it seems a rather complicated
program. The documentation for this program seems difficult to understand, I
just want to run this debugger on the same machine as the 4D Client program
(not a dual machine as the documentation prefers). How can I use this
program to easily detect 4D Client execuation problems? I've run the
debugger and from its File menu (Attach to a Process) I've told it to
monitor the 4D Client process. What next? It wold be nice if this debugger
could also record all key actions 4D Client does such as network traffic.

Ideally I would like to see a report from Windows listing the reason for the
4D Client crash (e.g. Access violation) and the location in the program
which caused the crash.

Some people here think this may be due to a memory leak in 4D Client or one
of its plug-ins. Or, could this be a printer driver or network problem?

4D Client has lots of memory allocated to it, around 10 blocks at 32,000K
each.

Regards,
David Craig

=================================================================
David T. Craig / CyberWolf Inc.
Aspen Plaza, 1596 Pacheco, Suite 203, Santa Fe, NM 87505 USA
505 983 6463 ext 15 / 505 988 2580 fax / dcraig-***@public.gmane.org
http://www.cyberwolf.com
=================================================================

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[Jeffrey Kain]

Post by David Craig
We have a customer whose 4D Client program crashes occassionaly but no
operating system alert appears when this happens. Crash happens after 4D
Client has run most of the day and the client prints a report.

Here's one possibility --

Is it printing to a printer that is being shared by another computer? We
found some crashes in our customer training center awhile back in 4D Client
v2003 where sometimes it would crash when printing to a shared printer.
Adding an inexpensive print server to the printer instead of sharing it from
a PC resolved the crash.

We used WinDbg to determine that the crash was happening after the printer
driver was loaded. Once you attach to a process and you get a crash, bring
up the call stack and see what's loaded and was happening right before the
crash.

If you don't have debug versions of the app you are debugging (4D, your
plug-ins, etc.), it will be much harder to decipher since you won't get
method names or references to specific pieces of code, but in this case we
were able to see that the crash always happened after 4D loaded a particular
printer driver into memory, which led us down the right path of noticing why
some computers crashed and others didn't, and finally noticing that the
crashers were printing to shared printers and the non-crashers were printing
to a directly-connected printer.

Jeff


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[Doug Nickerson]

Post by David Craig
This is for 4D Client 6.7 runing under Windows.
Some people here think this may be due to a memory
leak in 4D Client or one
of its plug-ins. Or, could this be a printer driver
or network problem?
Regards,
David Craig

I've had a single Windows client crashing, when others
in the same room could print to the same laser printer
successfully. Updating the printer driver fixed it.
You could compare the versions of the printer drvier
between the crash machine and machines that are not
crashing.

Doug
=================================================================

Post by David Craig
David T. Craig / CyberWolf Inc.
Aspen Plaza, 1596 Pacheco, Suite 203, Santa Fe, NM
87505 USA
505 983 6463 ext 15 / 505 988 2580 fax /
http://www.cyberwolf.com

=================================================================
**********************************************************************

Post by David Craig
4th Dimension Internet Users Group (4D iNUG)
FAQ: http://www.pdm-inc.com/iNUG/faq.htm

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Doug Nickerson
Bourne,Ma.
USofA



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