#26 Client completely stops

[Jeff Myers]

The client stops responding and updating after an undeterminate amount of time. Unfortunately it takes a few hours, so it's difficult to test. All the UI becomes unresponsive and the chat doesn't update.

I'm running Netscape 4.72 on i386 linux.

/msg binarydreams to contact me.

[N-Wing]

The actual E2 site has itself been slow in the last few days. However, since it takes a few hours to occur, it may be that it is taking up lots of memory, since it stores all messages it has gotten until the main window is closed. If this is the problem, it should be simple to purge the message storage, or only keep so large a backlog.

[Laurens Blankers]

Have the same problem, but it happens when I close the Netscape window from which I launched the Chatterbox. This is what the Java Console says:

Launcher.findRootURL(): getDocumentBase is: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Java%20Chatterbox

Launcher.findRootURL(): urlE2root: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Java%20Chatterbox

java.lang.NullPointerException: invalid peer

at java.awt.TextComponent.removeNotify(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.removeNotify(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.removeNotify(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.removeNotify(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.removeNotify(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.remove(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.Container.remove(Compiled Code)

* at netscape.applet.DerivedAppletFrame$DisposeAppletEvent.dispatch(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread$EventPump.dispatchEvents(Compiled Code)

at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Compiled Code)

at netscape.applet.DerivedAppletFrame$AppletEventDispatchThread.run(Compiled Code)

# Applet Launcher did not shut down within 30 seconds -- killing it.

BTW it doesn't freeze immediatly sometimes it takes a while.

[N-Wing]

After much hair pulling, the problem seems to be that the [chatterbox XML ticker] sometimes does not properly format its XML. (Rather, it never formats the XML correctly, but it sometimes doesn't close a tag. (I'm trying to track down the exact condition that causes this (on the server side), but haven't had much luck so far.)) The chatter parser assumed this tag would always be closed (or the connection would be broken before it finished), which caused an infinite loop, since the input string position was not incremented. This loop now always advances the position by at least 1, so it will eventually stop, although the bad ticker data will create some strange messages.

[N-Wing]

Oops, actually, it wasn't the parser that was causing an infinite loop, it was the method Message.toStringUserInput(byte) that caused it. (So getting the ticker caused no problems, but trying to display the message would cause a freeze.) Although this has been fixed since the earliest 0.1.10 release, this may be fixed in older version by simply adding the line: else oldi++; after the if bock in the while loop that starts with the comment "convert HTML into plain text" / "convert HTML tags into E2 links" (this is the section where the "a href=" tags are converted into square brackets).