TestStand execution stops sometimes

[Lars_L]

Hey Bruno,

How often are you seeing this behavior? Is it predictable or does it occur only on a certain type of custom MessagePopup?

Lars

[bruno_p]

Hi Lars,

This behaviour is not predictable and is difficult to debug.

It does not occur on a custom MessagePopup. I use the standard MessagePopup.

But the default seems to occur when I display an image on the popup (or it occurs more often when I display an image... I don't know).

Bruno

[ofer_o]

Hi:

The problem occurred again after a very long time it did not appear. Again the Testand system suspended after a message pop up with an image. It seems that the problem is not with the skchui.dll version.

Bruno: Did you find any solution?

I wander  if a customized pop up message written in Labview can solve the problem.

Ofer

[Rand_H]

Hello all,

Same problem here:

- TS 3.5 normal popup with jpg images.

- Random occurrence but ussually after many cicles (around 100)

- No skchui.dll in the system

- Same problem in W2000 and XP machines.

I also suggest that seems to be related with GUI memory leak.

I will follow your suggestions/answers very near.

Thanks

[TSJim]

Hi all - We are able to reproduce this issue.  This was reported to R&D (CAR ID# 141002) for further investigation. A possible workaround is to use LabVIEW dialogs or as Bruno found - use a custom MessagePopup.

Thanks,

Jim

Message Edited by TSJim on 01-16-2009 11:29 AM

[GovBob]

Jim,

 Could you clarify. Does this only happen when you use a pop-up with an image? Or a regular pop-up?

 Is this a problem with versions 4.0 and 4.1 as well?

[bruno_p]

Hi Ofer,

No, I did not find a solution.

But I advice the developers not to use jpg images but bmp images.

The users don't report me any more that TestStand hangs...

But I don't know if it solves the problem or if the problem occurs less often. I think it occurs less often.

Bruno

[Scott_Richardson]

Ofer and Bruno -

I am sorry that this took us a while to reproduce some soft of hang, but there appears to be a memory leak in the step type that was introduced in 4.0 and it is unrelated to displaying an image. We will need to look into what Ofer is seeing with 3.5 still. The 4.0 and later leak occurs when you run the step with a button or message that uses a font that does not conform to system. The step type uses a DC (device context) handle to scale the font size and the step type was not releasing the handle. The OS limits the number of these type of handles. This results in the potential to run out of available DC handles and the step type or other code that draws on windows will fail, so the failure hang could occur in the step type and other unrelated code and most code does not work well when this occurs.

The workaround for the 4.0 introduced issue is to reconfigure any step that you repeatedly display to no longer use non system font settings. I would be interested in whether you can try this out so that we can determine if this leak is the problem that you are seeing. In parallel, we will determine how we want to supply patches to our customer base to prevent this problem. Hopefully this leak is the issue that you have been seeing.

Thank you for your persistance in trying to solve this problem. We will keep you up to date on our work on these issues.

Message Edited by Scott Richardson on 01-17-2009 11:54 AM

[ofer_o]

Thank you all:

Scott: What is a "font that does not conform to system" ?

Ofer

[Scott_Richardson]

Ofer -

TestStand 3.5 does not have this but in 4.0 we allow Message Popup steps to configure the font for buttons and messages on the dialog. The context menu that is displayed when you click on the button to configure the font allows you to revert the setting by conforming to the system. This setting relies on the CVI RTE to select its default font which is the system font.