Re: [Upstage-list] quirks & flash backdrops

[Douglas B. <do...@pa...>]

Helen Varley Jamieson wrote:

> are these things actual bugs, or indicative of the general instability 
> of the environment? or is it that our server is not grunty enough? or 
> something else?

something else I think: the server was overloaded because of a bug in 
mbrola (the speech engine).  When you ask an avatar to say "eeeeeeeee- 
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee", mbrola can 
get stuck and eat up the CPU.  I stupidly didn't look for this until 
today, when I found there were two instances of mbrola saying "eee..." 
that had been running out of control since March 24.

In the normal run of thing the server is not at all overloaded, and 
fairly stable - it has been running continuously for 264 days, including 
the last two weeks at 100% CPU usage.

Anyway, I'll try putting a timeout on the speech subprocesses.  If it 
hasn't finished in 10 seconds or so, it will be killed.  Many of our 
bugs are like this -- imported from other software, that we can best 
deal with by isolating.


douglas