Very strange WinBoard crash

[Gábor Szots]

I install a new engine. It is placed at the bottom of the engine list, so I edit the list. Now I click on Options/Tournament and WB becomes translucent, the little circle (that shows data transfer) is spinning for ever. If I click on the top right X to close WB, a message tells me WB has stopped.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, the circle just means that Windows is waiting for a response from the application, not necessarily data transfer. So what you describe is usual for applications that get stuck in an infinite loop (so they don't respond anymore, but also do not do something illegal that would make the OS terminate them).

Could it be that in editing the engine list you inadvertantly deleted the linefeed after the last line, and that WinBoard chokes on that?

I guess I really should make buttons Up/Down in the Load Engine dialog that could be used to reorder the engines (like in the Game List Tags dialog), so that people would be less dependent on editing the engine list. But it is not so clear how I should handle grouping of engines. I could just swap an engine with the entire group in that case. But it is also conceivable that people want to absorb the engine in the group.

Perhaps the Up/Down buttons should swap the engine with a neighboring group (or engine) when an engine is selected, but should include a neighboring engine in a group when that group is selected. (And mayby I should change the text on the buttons when a group gets selected to make that clear.) You could 'eject' an engine from a group by first opening the group (so you can see the engines in it), and using Up/Down to push the engine out at the top or bottom.

They would still have to edit the list to create groups, however.

[Gábor Szots]

Could it be that in editing the engine list you inadvertantly deleted the linefeed after the last line, and that WinBoard chokes on that?

I guess I really should make buttons Up/Down in the Load Engine dialog that could be used to reorder the engines (like in the Game List Tags dialog), so that people would be less dependent on editing the engine list.

Could be but I have done that so many times that makes it practically impossible that this was the first time I did that, what is more, repeatedly.

However, I experience this behaviour only under my 64-bit Vista. On a 32-bit Windows 7 notebook everything is fine.

As for your idea of buttons, it might be convenient but editing the list is not a burden. Anyway, automatic sorting would be more elegant. Besides, clicking on a button several times doesn't seem to me much easier than moving an engine via editing.

[H.G.Muller]

Could be but I have done that so many times that makes it practically impossible that this was the first time I did that, what is more, repeatedly.

However, I experience this behaviour only under my 64-bit Vista. On a 32-bit Windows 7 notebook everything is fine.

That is strange. WinBoard is distributed by me as a 32-bit application. Which presumably uses the infra-structure (DLLs) of the 32-bit run-time system. It coud be that we invoke a library function that is buggy on Vista, but not on Win 7.

It could also be that WinBoard is configured differently on the two machines, e.g. that the list of installed engines is different, and that on one it is causing problems (perhaps because it has become too long, and overflows some buffer).

Can you retrieve the winboard47.ini files from your AppData folder, and post the engine lists in them, so that I could use them for testing if this also makes my WinBoard crash? Ot just copy-past the entire list from the Edit Engine List dialog?

As for your idea of buttons, it might be convenient but editing the list is not a burden. Anyway, automatic sorting would be more elegant. Besides, clicking on a button several times doesn't seem to me much easier than moving an engine via editing.

Well, that was my original idea too, which is why I left the buttons out. The only disadvantage of editing is that people could damage existing lines, rather than just moving them around. But you also want to be able to do that intentionally, for adding options you forgot or regret adding on an earlier install. Yet it seems there are people who dislike editing as a matter of principle.

But perhaps it is indeed not worth it. I did think of a good system to do it, however: when moving a single engine up or down, it would simply be swapped with whatever was above/below it in the list (be it a single engine or a group). Only when it hits the top / bottom of the list for an opened group it would be moved out of the group, to the encompassing level. But when you would move a group down, it would 'eat' anything below it (be it single engine or other group). If you would move a group up, however, it would not do that, but simply swap with whatever was above it. This would then still allow you to swap two groups. Implementing all that would be a lot of work, though.

[Gábor Szots]

Can you retrieve the winboard47.ini files from your AppData folder, and post the engine lists in them, so that I could use them for testing if this also makes my WinBoard crash? Ot just copy-past the entire list from the Edit Engine List dialog?

Unfortunately I am away from home till Friday and I have no connection with my home machine. As a reminder, though, I had no problems under 4.7.0, then got crashes with 4.7.1 and now cannot use 4.7.2 at all.

[H.G.Muller]

Well, once you get back, please send me your engine list somehow. My guess is that it must have something to do with that. I am currently using 4.7.2 for tourney, and it runs fine.

[Gábor Szots]

Hopefully you have received my WB ini. I wonder if it is of any use to you because I have installed several engines since I sent it to you and there were no more crashes.

[H.G.Muller]

I have not had time to try if I could reproduce the crashes yet. I also received another report of crashing during a tourney. This will be a tough one to find. The strange thing is that between 4.7.0 and 4.7.2 I did change absolutely nothing about the tourney manager. In fact I hardly changed anything substantial at all. (Most fixes for 4.7.1 were XBoard-only). Yet there seems to be a difference in behavior...

[Gábor Szots]

I have not had time to try if I could reproduce the crashes yet. I also received another report of crashing during a tourney. This will be a tough one to find. The strange thing is that between 4.7.0 and 4.7.2 I did change absolutely nothing about the tourney manager. In fact I hardly changed anything substantial at all. (Most fixes for 4.7.1 were XBoard-only). Yet there seems to be a difference in behavior...

Please remember that this is not about the tourney manager but about installing engines and editing the list.

One thing I forgot to mention but I think is self-evident anyway is that after the crash the changes to the list are lost.

[Roger Brown]

I have not had time to try if I could reproduce the crashes yet. I also received another report of crashing during a tourney. This will be a tough one to find. The strange thing is that between 4.7.0 and 4.7.2 I did change absolutely nothing about the tourney manager. In fact I hardly changed anything substantial at all. (Most fixes for 4.7.1 were XBoard-only). Yet there seems to be a difference in behavior...

Hello H.G.,

I have a strange crash to report as well.

I primarily use Winboard as a device for self-play and personal study.

There was a recently added feature to Winboard that recently used engines appeared at the bottom of the drop down list and could be selected directly from that list.

I enjoyed this feature as it made scrolling through the engine list unnecessary and my engine list is a long one...

Abrok would automatically load as it is the first engine alphabetically in my engine list. I would then use the drop down to switch to Usurpator II, my sparring partner.

Since the latest version I have been experiencing crashes when I do this. Consistently. Every time.

Winboard loads Usurpator II just fine from the engine list when I select it directly so there is nothing wrong with the engine or Winboard separately.

There are three files connected with the error:

WER4527.tmp.version.txt
WER5C7F.tmp.appcompat.txt
WER5E64.tmp.mdmp

I am reading all sorts of checksum and size information in one and the other txt file is describing my system. The mddmp file is 3 Mb so far.

I hope this helps.

Later.

[Gábor Szots]

Hello HG,

I did it again, this time in a new way.

I loaded Deuterium, then clicked on Options/Tournament. WB turned "milky", and upon exiting the usual error message appeared (WB stopped).

This is the Deuterium line and its adjacent lines from my ini:

"Der Bringer 1.9" -fcp "Bringer_19.exe /winboard" -fd "C:\Sakk\WB-engines\Bringer" -fn "Der Bringer 1.9" -firstProtocolVersion 1 -fNoOwnBookUCI
"Deuterium 13.1.31.113 64-bit" -fcp "Deuterium_13.1.31.113-x64.exe" -fd "C:\Sakk\WB-engines\Deuterium" -fn "Deuterium 13.1.31.113 64-bit" -fNoOwnBookUCI
"Dirty Sep 5 2012 64-bit" -fcp "Dirty_120904-x64.exe" -fd "C:\Sakk\WB-engines\Dirty" -fn "Dirty Sep 5 2012 64-bit" -fNoOwnBookUCI

[H.G.Muller]

I now have more time again to work on WinBoard, and am still brooding about this mysterious crash. The problem is that I cannot reproduce it. I have made a fresh install of WB 4.7.2 on my laptop, and changed the master winboard.ini file to use Gabor's ini file he sent me. Of course I have none of the engines in his list actually installed, but as long as I don't try to run them, that should not be a problem.

I tried the things described here (installing new engines, editing the list, opening the Tournament dialog, clicking a recent engine), in various orders, but none of them resulted in a crash. I also checked the length of Gabor's engine list. It was 29KB, which is very far below the limit for reading in option settings (which uses a 128KB buffer). So it doesn't seem to be that the list is too long. So I am a bit at a loss on how to proceed.

Gabor, can you still reproducibly cause these crashes? If you can, I could make a special version of WinBoard 4.7.2 that would print more debug info from the routines that edit the engine list, or display it in the tournament dialog, and we could try to cause a few crashes while making a debug file.

[Gábor Szots]

Gabor, can you still reproducibly cause these crashes? If you can, I could make a special version of WinBoard 4.7.2 that would print more debug info from the routines that edit the engine list, or display it in the tournament dialog, and we could try to cause a few crashes while making a debug file.

So far I have used WB 4.7.2 on 3 computers: a Q6600 with 64-bit Vista, an E6550 with 32-bit XP and a notebook (don't remember the processor but it is some Intel Exxx) with 32-bit Windows 7. Only on my home machine with Vista have I experienced the behaviour described in my posts. The problems started with version 4.7.1.

After all these troubles I have reverted to WB 4.7.0 with which I have no problems whatsoever. I also advised to Roger Brown, who also had crashes with 4.7.2, to revert to 4.7.0. He has done that and he also does not have problems since.

So, unfortunately, I have now 4.7.0 installed. At the moment I do not have much time to experiment, I just arrange tournaments and let them run. However, near Christmas time I am going to spend several days at home and then we could try something.

Best regards,
Gábor

[H.G.Muller]

Well, I still do have a PC with Vista. Sounds like a good idea to try if I have problems there. Although it is a 32-bit Vista.

[Roger Brown]

Dear HG,

I wonder if the clue to this problem is in the OS.

I am operating Windows Vista, 32 bit, here as well.

Later.

[Gábor Szots]

Hi Harm-Geet,

It seems to me that with version 4.7.3 you have solved all the problems that I had described here. No crashes, no milky way. Thank you.

One thing I have noticed: when I make a change to the engine list, winboard.ini reflects those changes only after I have exited WB. Maybe it is normal behaviour and the changes are in some temporary file.

Gábor

[H.G.Muller]

Well, it remains very mysterious. I was never able to reproduce the crash on any of my systems, not even when using your ini file.

The engine list is saved in the ini file, and the ini file is written only when you quit WinBoard (and only then when you have "Save Settings on Exit" on). This is the same for any settings you would change; the changes live only in memory until closing WinBoard triggers saving them back to the settings file. This has the advantage that when you completely mess up, you can always untick "Save Settings on Exit" before you close, to recover the old situation. (Like in text editors, when quitting without saving.)

Of course you can always force saving settings earlier, by using the menu item "Save Settings Now". After making extensive changes to the engine list, that is probably a good thing to do. Especially if you want to start up other WinBoard instances that also should see the new engines.

[Gábor Szots]

Well, it remains very mysterious. I was never able to reproduce the crash on any of my systems, not even when using your ini file.

It's getting even more mysterious. I have a lot of crashes again with version 4.7.3a. Mostly with certain engines. And sometimes an engine won't start (this happens mostly with Twisted Logic 20090922 64-bit). I'm going back to 4.7.3 to see if the problem persists.

I think it is somehow in connection with writing the disk. Maybe it's something with the Vista directory structure. The other day I stopped a tournament and invoked some pull-down menu in WB and it crashed when I selected an option there.

[Gábor Szots]

Well, it remains very mysterious. I was never able to reproduce the crash on any of my systems, not even when using your ini file.

It's getting even more mysterious. I have a lot of crashes again with version 4.7.3a. Mostly with certain engines. And sometimes an engine won't start (this happens mostly with Twisted Logic 20090922 64-bit). I'm going back to 4.7.3 to see if the problem persists.

I think it is somehow in connection with writing the disk. Maybe it's something with the Vista directory structure. The other day I stopped a tournament and invoked some pull-down menu in WB and it crashed when I selected an option there.

[Gábor Szots]

Well, it remains very mysterious. I was never able to reproduce the crash on any of my systems, not even when using your ini file.

It's getting even more mysterious. I have a lot of crashes again with version 4.7.3a. Mostly with certain engines. And sometimes an engine won't start (this happens mostly with Twisted Logic 20090922 64-bit). I'm going back to 4.7.3 to see if the problem persists.

It seems it is the same with 4.7.3, only the Twisted Logic start error has not shown up.