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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Fragility
From:       Uwe Thiem <uwe () uwix ! alt ! na>
Date:       2000-09-12 20:05:42
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On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, David Faure wrote:

> On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, pbrown@redhat.com wrote :
> >File management still sometimes bites you.
> 
> I'd be happy to hear how and when !

Just an example that happened to me half an our ago:

I opened Konqueror, unfolded a couple of folders in the treeview
(think is was: / => /opt => /opt/qt2 => /opt/qt2/doc) and
Konqueror (or something else, no chance to find out) immediately
started to eat up *all* CPU (even the mouse pointer didn't react
any more), hard disk access like hell (probably paging to death on
a system with 192MB ram).

I couldn't exit Konqueror, couldn't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace X, couldn't
switch to a virtual console, couldn't access the box over network
any more. All I could do was hitting the NT-stabaliser-button on
that box. After I waited a long time for it to recover by itself.

Off course, I have not bt because I have no core file. Fortunately,
the system recovered nicely on reboot (since there was a real
shitload of hard disk IO when I resetted the box I guess it really
was paging; otherwise I would have got lots of fs repair messages
during bootup). 

I restarted X and KDE and both came up smoothly. I tried to hit
that bug (I assume it is a bug in Konqueror or one of the
libraries) again (the box doesn't contain any valuable data
currently; so I can mess it up completely): no luck!

Usually, I wouldn't have reported this because I don't have any
useful info except for the fact it happened. Things like this
happen to me on a daily basis. Usually, KDE wouldn't start
afterwards. This time it did.

These are things that scare me. Unreproduceable bugs. Fuck! To answer
to another mail in this thread, I am using KDE on different machines:

- Dec Alpha 500 with 256 MB of ram, 3 SCSI hard drives (+ an unused, not
  mounted, IDE hard drive I use for testing new Linux distributions),
  ELSA Winner 2000AVI/3D video card with 4 MB ram, a sound card not known
  to any OS I know of :-( running SuSE 6.3 (not 6.2 as I stated wrongly in
  another mail). SuSE is plain vanilla.

- Intel Pentium II 400 with 256 MB of ram, 2 x 13GB EIDE hard disk,
  Rage 128 video card with 8 MB of ram,  one of the ESS sound cards
  running vanilla SuSE 6.4 (libjpeg.la edited, Qt-2.0 not installed).

- Laptop with Intel Celeron (Mendocino) 400 with 192 MB of ram, 6GB
  EIDE hard disk, Rage 128 video onboard with 8 MB of ram, ESS Solo
  sound on board running vanilla SuSE 6.4 (libjpeg.la edited, Qt-2.0 not
  installed).

- (This is *not* my box!) Intel Pentium III 733 (633? don't remember
  right now and don't have access to it from home) with 256 MB of ram,
  45GB EIDE hard disk :-), an INTEL sound card I'm not familiar with
  running vanilla SuSE 6.4 (libjpeg.la edited, Qt-2.0 not installed).

I use CVS on the first three boxes and the FTP snapshots on the last
one because it's sitting behind a firewall (I could poke a hole into
that firewall for CVS but was too busy so far) an the Namibian
KDE mirror is on that local network.

I have similar problems on all these boxes. I doubt it that all of them
have got ram or other hardware problems (as suggested in another
mail).

Well, remember the days of 1.x? The vast majority (me included) found
KDE quite fast. There was a minority, though, that claimed it was
dog slow even on decent boxes. I once got a message from someone I
trusted (and still do) completely when it comes to IT (my now business
partner Madryn Jon Cosburn) who claimed he had a box running KDE
at a snail's speed. Unfortunately, he had to cannibalise that box
by the time I rushed over to him (he wasn't my partner by then ;-).
We never solved that mystery.

I'd like to avoid a similar situation with KDE 2.0. Only this time,
it's much more serious. It isn't just sluggishness, it's fragility
(on a minority's boxes it seems).

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not beating this issue to death out
of hostility. To the contrary, KDE is my baby, too. I love it and 
want it to prosper as much as it can. That's why I'm nitpicking
about the instabilities so much. Problem is, usually I'm left without
core files or anything else useful. Fuck, I really want that
100,000 USD hardware debugger I used in Germany. Hey, if we can get
Intel to provide us with one of their hardware debuggers (extremely
expensive) we can probably solve all problems in KDE!

Chris, are you listening? That might be a real challenge to them but
would provide *real* to us. Hardware debuggers are extremely
handy.

Well, enough of ranting. Actually, I wanted to use this time to do
some debugging. *Sigh*.

Uwe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Uwe Thiem                                        Tel:  +264 - 61 - 249249
P.O.Box 30955                                    Email:   uwe@uwix.alt.na
Windhoek                                                      uwe@kde.org
Republic of Namibia                                    http://www.kde.org
                  **********************************
         You can still escape from the GATES of hell: Use KDE!
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