Repeatedly hanging on a Windows system without admin privileges
Hypertext-infused philosophy personal database software
Brought to you by:
jasonwinning
Menu
▾
▴
#73 Repeatedly hanging on a Windows system without admin privileges
Hi Jason, I have no clue how best to explain or diagnose this problem, so I'm speculatively hoping you might have some ideas.
Hypernomicon works great on my home machine. But it constantly hangs and even crashes on my work machine. Both are Windows 11; the only salient difference I can think of is that I don't have admin access on my work machine. There are various other programs that I guess it could be conflicting with, but I wouldn't have the first idea how to find the source of the problem.
This is still happening on the new version 1.30; each time I've tried to shut it down today I've had to force-quit after the XML files have been updated.
Is there anything that could cause this kind of behaviour, and any way I can prevent it?
Thanks
When you say it crashes, what exactly do you mean by that? Is there an error message, or does the application quit on its own, or anything like that?
I have a somewhat similar experience because while it works fine at home, when I use it on my work computer, every once in a while it will freeze for a while and then work normally, especially if I exit and restart the application. But I haven't seen any crashing. I don't know why a permissions issue would cause this; I suspected it could be something else running on the computer interfering with it. But I never see any error and the application never quits on its own, just freezes temporarily.
If what I'm describing is exactly the same as what you are experiencing, I'll try to figure out what's going on.
Also have you tried running as administrator?
What you describe sounds identical to my experience. When I said "crash" I just meant hanging for a very long time on opening and when doing tasks like saving to XML. It hangs indefinitely and I have to force-quit when closing the program. There are never any error messages and it never closes on its own. I guess "freeze" is a more accurate term.
I haven't been able to run it as an administrator as I don't have those privileges. But since my problem sounds the same as yours, we can maybe infer that running as an administrator on your work machine would have similar results as if we were able to do the same on mine.
Usually when there is a permissions issue it will just crash with an "Access Denied" error instead of hanging. On my work computer, I actually have to run with special command line parameters so it will cache certain DLLs into a folder where I have permissions to execute code in order to prevent those errors. I could make those command line options part of the released executable but I suspect it would not fix this issue (since I still experience the hanging at work).
I have had a hard time reproducing this lately at work (it is very intermittent for me). I was able to do a thread dump while it was hanging at one point and there is evidence pointing to the WebView component, which has had freezing issues in the past: https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8263788
Let me know if you find anything that makes the problem more likely to happen or any other significant difference between your home and work computer. Another difference for me is that I have my database in a OneDrive synched folder at work but DropBox at home.
Last edit: Jason Winning 2025-02-13
"Intermittent" is the watchword here too. Although it seems to be a lot better now then when I first opened this issue. Perhaps it was very bad only immediately after installation of the new version (v1.30). In the past few days it seems to have been fine. If the previous instances of it hanging a few months ago were also in the wake of new version installs (I didn't keep track of that, but they might have been), it could be something on the PC scanning fastidiously for viruses or similar. Once the new version has been run a few times the PC settles down and accepts it.
Utterly speculative, but I'm happy that it's happy now.
I run NextCloud on both work and home PCs. In addition I have Google Drive at home, but I doubt that it's the lack of Google Drive that's causing the occasional slowdowns at work.
Just checked, and my work machine also has a process called WebView. I don't know whether that's the cause here too, but the fact that it's on the machine makes it a reasonable explanation.
Update: it is looking like this may have been fixed in JavaFX 24. If so, I will get a new version released soon with JavaFX upgraded to 24 (Hypernomicon 1.31 uses JavaFX 22). It looks like the culprit was actually a bug within WebKit itself (the browser engine underlying the JavaFX webview), so not even a JavaFX-specific bug; JavaFX 24 includes a number of backported WebKit bugfixes, apparently including one for this issue.
I will also need to do some testing to make sure there are no regressions with the upgrade to JavaFX 24.