WB 4.7.1

[Gábor Szots]

I installed this version only yesterday, but it crashed already twice, after only a couple of dozens of games, and once it could not start one of the engines.
I have no time to investigate the matter but if possible I would like to have version 4.7.0 again which I deleted but which never crashed.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, the 4.7.0 installer is still on my website ( http://hgm.nubati.net/WinBoard-4.7.0.exe ).

I am a bit shocked about this, however. There is hardly any difference between 4.7.0 and 4.7.1, almost all the changes were for the XBoard front-end. Or they were in code that would only be executed for non-mainstream applications, like setting up a position after overruling the standard board size, unrecognized options in a settings file, etc.

There really is only one patch that affects WinBoard and is often used, which intended to fix an overflow that occured with engines that sent extremely long feature lines. If I messed up there, it could affect engine loading.

[Gábor Szots]

Sorry that I can't help at the moment but it seems that the problem comes up with GNU Chess 5.07.173b 64-bit.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, should the problem not be related to the WinBoard version, but simply to the emergence of an engine version that was not around yet when you were using WinBoard 4.7.0, changing back to the latter will not solve it.

but it crashed already twice, after only a couple of dozens of games, and once it could not start one of the engines.

When you say 'crashed', what exactly do you mean? Does it exit spontaneously? (And if so, with or without error popup?) Or does it just hang? And if the tourney hangs, does WinBoard display a message in the PV field above the board, and does it still respond to the window close button?

When you play a multi-cycle tourney WinBoard suggests 'Sync after cycle' by default, so unless you explicitly unticked that when setting up the tourney, there is the possibility that at some point WinBoard will refuse to start a game, but in stead will just wait displaying 'waiting for other games'. This is intended behavior when there are still games of the previous cycle being played by other WinBoard instances. But sometimes this happens erroneously, as a result of a game that is not currently being played being marked in the tourney file as 'in progress'. This should normally not happen, because when WinBoard stops playing a game (whether it is through the game finishing normally, being aborted, or WinBoard exiting on user command), it should remove the marker from the tourney file that says the game is in progress. (But if the game for instance aborted because of a power fail or forceful killing of winboard.exe from the task manager, it would not have had the opportunity to do that.)

The way to check this if you experience trouble in the progress of a tourney is to have a look at the tourney file when WinBoard is not running. The -results string (last line of the file) should then NOT contain any *. If it does, there is trouble for sure, as this marks the game as 'in progress', so that no WinBoard you start anew would ever pick that game. Replacing the * by a space with a text editor should repair this condition. (It is what WinBoard should have done when the game finished without a result.)

It could be that there still exist particular ways for a game to crash (perhaps when loading a new engine fails?) that would prevent WinBoard from removing the * marker for it in the .trn file, and that the engine you suspect knows how to tickle this bug. If you have trouble again, please send me the .trn file (after closing all WinBoard instances).

[Gábor Szots]

Well, should the problem not be related to the WinBoard version, but simply to the emergence of an engine version that was not around yet when you were using WinBoard 4.7.0, changing back to the latter will not solve it.

I started the tournament using 4.7.0 and it ran without issues. Then, as 4.7.1 appeared, I stopped the tournament, replaced 4.7.0 with the new version and resumed the tournament. That's when the problems started. After that I switched back to 4.7.0 and I could finish the tournament without further issues.
Of course, owing to the relatively low number of games (a few hundreds), this could be a random noise.

but it crashed already twice, after only a couple of dozens of games, and once it could not start one of the engines.

When you say 'crashed', what exactly do you mean? Does it exit spontaneously? (And if so, with or without error popup?) Or does it just hang? And if the tourney hangs, does WinBoard display a message in the PV field above the board, and does it still respond to the window close button?

An error message appeared on the screen saying that the program stopped because of some error and asked me if I want to close the program (I did want).
I do not remember if WinBoard was still there to be seen, I am not good at these details. However, I would remember if WB had dispalyed a message of its own and it didn't.

When you play a multi-cycle tourney WinBoard suggests 'Sync after cycle' by default, so unless you explicitly unticked that when setting up the tourney, there is the possibility that at some point WinBoard will refuse to start a game, but in stead will just wait displaying 'waiting for other games'. This is intended behavior when there are still games of the previous cycle being played by other WinBoard instances. But sometimes this happens erroneously, as a result of a game that is not currently being played being marked in the tourney file as 'in progress'. This should normally not happen, because when WinBoard stops playing a game (whether it is through the game finishing normally, being aborted, or WinBoard exiting on user command), it should remove the marker from the tourney file that says the game is in progress. (But if the game for instance aborted because of a power fail or forceful killing of winboard.exe from the task manager, it would not have had the opportunity to do that.)

The way to check this if you experience trouble in the progress of a tourney is to have a look at the tourney file when WinBoard is not running. The -results string (last line of the file) should then NOT contain any *. If it does, there is trouble for sure, as this marks the game as 'in progress', so that no WinBoard you start anew would ever pick that game. Replacing the * by a space with a text editor should repair this condition. (It is what WinBoard should have done when the game finished without a result.)

It could be that there still exist particular ways for a game to crash (perhaps when loading a new engine fails?) that would prevent WinBoard from removing the * marker for it in the .trn file, and that the engine you suspect knows how to tickle this bug. If you have trouble again, please send me the .trn file (after closing all WinBoard instances).

There was indeed an asterisk in the touranment file which I replaced with a space each time and the tournament could be resumed all right.

At the moment I have no WB tournament running but I am going to install 4.7.1 once again and look at more thoroughly at my next tournament.

[H.G.Muller]

OK, thanks for the info. I now received an e-mail from someone else who also reports similar crashes (where Windows 7 reports with a popup that WinBoard is no longer working). What you say strongly suggests it is a specific 4.7.1 problem. That on such a crash it leaves a game unjustly marked as 'in progress' is normal, and that it then later refuses to continue with the next cycle (if Sync after cycle was left on) is normal too.

I was even able to reproduce these crashes using the same tourney file and engine install lines in the ini file as the person that reported it. I even managed to put a few extra prints to the debug file in it, to zoom in on the point where it crashes. But mysteriously enough at some point it suddenly stopped crashing, and even after removing the print statements again, the version that first crashed now runs like a charm. Very annoying...

[Gábor Szots]

OK, thanks for the info. I now received an e-mail from someone else who also reports similar crashes (where Windows 7 reports with a popup that WinBoard is no longer working). What you say strongly suggests it is a specific 4.7.1 problem. That on such a crash it leaves a game unjustly marked as 'in progress' is normal, and that it then later refuses to continue with the next cycle (if Sync after cycle was left on) is normal too.

I was even able to reproduce these crashes using the same tourney file and engine install lines in the ini file as the person that reported it. I even managed to put a few extra prints to the debug file in it, to zoom in on the point where it crashes. But mysteriously enough at some point it suddenly stopped crashing, and even after removing the print statements again, the version that first crashed now runs like a charm. Very annoying...

I describe to you what today happened.

I started the ongoing tournament from my office machine using TeamViewer on both machines. I looked at it a couple of times during the day and it went without problems. Before I left for home I exited TeamViewer turned off my office computer. When I arrived home I found TeamViewer's goodbye message on my screen and a halted WinBoard with the usual error message and the usual asterisk in the trn file.
This can be a coincidence or not. I have had the suspicion that the problem is somehow related to internet usage, I did not use a browser or mail client on my home machine the whole day, there were no problems, and now that I exited TeamViewer WB stopped as well.

I have the winboard debug if needed.

[H.G.Muller]

Was this with 4.7.0 or 4.7.1? And the * was the last game in the result string?

If WinBoard would crash by calling some system service that is buggy, it is unlikely this can be cured within WinBoard. I did have some crashes myself, however, which I now cannot reproduce anymore. But perhaps the secret is in what I had running on that PC at the same time.

[Gábor Szots]

Was this with 4.7.0 or 4.7.1? And the * was the last game in the result string?

If WinBoard would crash by calling some system service that is buggy, it is unlikely this can be cured within WinBoard. I did have some crashes myself, however, which I now cannot reproduce anymore. But perhaps the secret is in what I had running on that PC at the same time.

This was with 4.7.1, I have never had issues with 4.7.0. The * was the last game.

Later in the afternoon I had one more crash (I was watching a live broadcast of the Thessaloniki FIDE Grand Prix at that time) but then WB went on running smoothly for a couple of hours.

[Gábor Szots]

Some regularity: The crashes occur mainly after Gandalf has finished its second game in a round and GarboChess is to play. I have also had crashes between two Pharaon games.