My program is not stable

[St.wing]

Now i encounter a very strange phenomena,my program will breakdown frenquently in some specific time ,but will do fine in anthother time.All the enviroment include the input and hardware is the same .is it possible that something is wrong in the machine itself?such as some bad-point in the memory ?
by the way,who know some tools in OVMS to check the memory ,is there some way to know the healthy state of hardware of the machine ?

expect your answer,it is urgent.

Thanks

[Karl Rohwedder]

Check the error count (SHOW ERROR) and look into the error log (ANA/ERR/ELV,DIAGNOSE or SEA), anything strange?

Explain 'breakdown'? Are there errormessages when the application stops or does it create a process dump?

Does it depend on the time, how long the application has been running, before it breaks (may be a resource exhausted)?

regards Kalle

[Volker Halle]

St.wing,

welcome to the OpenVMS forum.

OpenVMS is normally very good at providing error information, if something goes wrong. This includes both software and hardware problems.

If you could include this information, it would help a lot in determining what problem you are seeing. Consider to include the error messages as an attachment .TXT file in your next reply.

What kind of 'instability' are you seeing: System crash ? Program terminating due to some error ?

OpenVMS includes a suite of software tools called UETP (User Environment Test Package), which is a collecting of test tools, which can put a certain load on the system and 'stress test' the system. You could run this, if you believe the system to have a general problem.

See the UETP documentation in chapter 5 of the System Manager's Manual Volume 2:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/82FINAL/aa-pv5nj-tk/aa-pv5nj-tk.HTMl

Volker.

[St.wing]

thanks for your help.
i will do some experiment to collect error information at once,and next time i can repeat more details of the error .
as karl mentioned,the cause of the phenomena is like some resource exhausted.maybe something(it is ambiguos,i don't know exactly) occured,the working set and the virtual pages of the process will increase at an abnormal rate(the rate of working set increase is about 40 per second).when the working set parameter reached about 3400,the process will breakdown.in my option,the phenomena is at random.i do not catch any rule of the error.if the process is in the fine state ,all the parameters is stable.
my program do not rely on the time ,and it do not record any state of itself.

[St.wing]

Today,I tried to dump some error files to collect some useful information,but I failed.Because the program seems in a strange state.It does not work any more,however, it does not shutdown either.It seems that my program is waiting something sunch as some specific resource that is locked.during the abnormal time, the cpu time does not increase and the memory size does not increase either.
who can give me some advice?
It is so boring.
thank you!

[Ian Miller.]

what state is the process?
(LEF, HIB, etc)

[Volker Halle]

St.wing,

why you're describing sounds like a 'hung process'.

As Ian said, look for the process state. You can also examine a hung process with SDA in the running system:

$ ANA/SYS
SDA> SET PROC/IND=
SDA> SHOW PROC
SDA> SHOW PROC/CHAN ! look for busy channels
SDA> SHOW PROC/LOCK ! is first lock shown in WAITING state ?
SDA> CLUE CALL ! show current call stack

Volker.

[Ian Miller.]

Volker,
"SDA> SHOW PROC/CHAN ! look for busy channels
SDA> SHOW PROC/LOCK ! is first lock shown in WAITING state ?"

Shouldn't these be done in the reverse order as the SHOW /CHAN can hang if the process is waiting for certain locks?

[Volker Halle]

Ian,

good point ! It doesn't matter in a crash, but on the running system, it may cause SHOW PROC/CHAN to hang, if SDA tries to translate the FID to the file name !

Thanks,

Volker.

[St.wing]

The state of my process is HIB ,this morning i am going to do the experiment.
thank for your clue,Volker,i am green one.
i need your support.