ID:1318112
 
Resolved
Some pager messages could cause freezes.
BYOND Version:499
Operating System:Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Web Browser:Firefox 24.0
Applies to:BYOND Pager
Status: Resolved (499.1200)

This issue has been resolved.
Descriptive Problem Summary: Starting late last night, I've noticed that anytime the pager notification pops up (IE: A friend logging in, or even the initial pop up showing online friends when you first login.) The pager stops responding, requiring me to restart and repeat the process. At first, I thought this may just be me, however I've talked to a couple other people who are also experiencing this.

Numbered Steps to Reproduce Problem:
1) Open BYOND.
2) Login.
3) Notification Popup appears.
4) BYOND freezes.

Code Snippet (if applicable) to Reproduce Problem:


Expected Results:
Notification goes away after a few seconds.

Actual Results:
Notification freezes, causing the Pager to stop responding.

Does the problem occur:
Every time? Or how often?
Every time.
In other games?
Not applicable.
In other user accounts?
Yes, I've tried on both accounts on my computer.
On other computers?
Yes, on my both computer and a seperate laptop.

When does the problem NOT occur?

Did the problem NOT occur in any earlier versions? If so, what was the last version that worked? (Visit http://www.byond.com/download/build to download old versions for testing.)
I had beta version 1197 until a few minutes ago, when I upgraded to 1199 and still experience the same problem.

Workarounds:

I'm also having this problem. I want to say it occurred less in V1197. I'm running windows 8 if that helps. Compatibility options did not help.
That's quite bizarre. I've never seen anything like that. If you open up Task Manager, can you see if byond.exe is racing at all during that time? And is the freeze indefinite, or does it clear after some time (even as long as a few minutes)?

I'm sure I'm going to have trouble tracking this down because I've never seen this in action, but any details at all that you can get would be helpful.
It completely freezes, it does not stop. After opening Task Manager, I now have noticed that the memory being used by BYOND starts to wildly fluctuate and increase, it starts at around 50 MB and slowly increases the longer I keep it on (while it is non-responsive.)

After about a minute its at 100MB and still rising, slowly and sporadically. My CPU holds steady, the entire time.
That would suggest that it's not necessarily related to notifications; it sounds like the UI itself is churning. (One way you can test that is to turn your notification bubbles off entirely. If you set that in an older build it should respect your settings.) I'm curious if during this time, anything is happening with cfg\localhub.db in your user data directory; does that keep updating constantly, or is it staying relatively steady and only updating now and then?
After loading 498 and disabling notifications then coming back to 499, everything seems to working as intended (with notifications disabled.) BYOND holds steady at ~43MB of RAM. If you'd like, I will re-enable notifications and try to see if the issue persists while watching the localhub.db file.
my localhub.db does not update often(from what I've seen) and localhub.db-wal updates every time I login. However, I'm having trouble making it freeze now. Sometimes it clears up, and sometimes I just can't get it to start.
I'm wondering if this could be caused by the feed? I know that Lavitiz just posted something on his Feed to a game that I have 'Helper' on (if that would even make a difference.) I noticed that my pager froze at about the same time that he initially posted the update.
In response to SnipeDragon
That's a mighty intriguing guess. We had an issue awhile back with multiple alert beeps going on for feeds, and we suppressed that with a simple timer on the frontend. But if something caused the feed's update routine to get called repeatedly, though I'm at a loss to see how that would happen, that would cause the kind of churning that's been described; it might also explain the previous bug.
In response to SnipeDragon
SnipeDragon wrote:
I'm wondering if this could be caused by the feed? I know that Lavitiz just posted something on his Feed to a game that I have 'Helper' on (if that would even make a difference.) I noticed that my pager froze at about the same time that he initially posted the update.

That's when mine started acting up too! I made a mistake in the first feed, then it started crashing. Now it won't crash. It don't crash when others post feeds though.
Lummox JR resolved issue with message:
Some pager messages could cause freezes.