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WebSite Information => Comments, Suggestions & Questions => Topic started by: PAUL555 on 2008.01.19, 12:54:10

Title: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: PAUL555 on 2008.01.19, 12:54:10

  Hi All , 

     Has  the  single  input  queue  problem  been  completly  resolved  in  Ecomstation  ?  I  know  that  IBM  attempted  to  fix  this  with  Fixpack  17  for  OS/2  Warp  3.0 . Was  it  ever  resolved  or  is  there  just  a  workaround  ? 

Regards

Nirmal
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Andi710 on 2008.01.21, 01:28:01
AFAIK, nothing substantial has been changed in this respect.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: mobybrick on 2008.01.21, 01:56:07
I have to say that errant apps hogging the entire OS has been much less of a problem since Warp 4 - and eComStation further enhances this with the integration of CADH.

The ability to 'kill' errant processes allows queue hogs to be (usually) removed.

Regards,
Moby.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2008.01.21, 01:57:13
Many apps still simply refuse to end, either with TOP or Window list and using hard kill, necessitating a reboot to get the WPS back.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: mobybrick on 2008.01.21, 02:00:52
Curious. I normally find that with a 30-second wait (for the SIQ 'fix' to fully complete) most apps close. The thing to do is to wait for the 30-second timeout upon hang, before trying to kill the application.

Regards,
Moby.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Pete on 2008.01.21, 02:11:04
Quote from: PAUL555 on 2008.01.19, 12:54:10

  Hi All , 

     Has  the  single  input  queue  problem  been  completly  resolved  in  Ecomstation  ?  I  know  that  IBM  attempted  to  fix  this  with  Fixpack  17  for  OS/2  Warp  3.0 . Was  it  ever  resolved  or  is  there  just  a  workaround  ? 

Regards

Nirmal


I'm not quite sure if it ever got classified as "Resolved" but it certainly does not seem to cause the problems that it did with W3 and early W4 installations.

Might be worth using Google to find a few posts on the topic.

Regards

Pete
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Criguada on 2008.01.21, 13:32:08
The SIQ problem has not been solved, but a thorough workaround ha been put in place. The only way to solve the SIQ problem would be to implement a MIQ (multiple input queue); this has been judged as infeasible by IBM because it would break a lot of the existing applications.
The SIQ fix has been doing a good job, and eCS has very few problems in my expercience due to the SIQ. Those who think they are experiencing the SIQ problem, mostly are experiencing other bugs (in the WPS or in other apps/classes).
One example is the problem of unkillable tasks: this is a completely different problem/limitation in OS/2, which can not easily be fixed without rewriting the kernel. I can offer a technical explanation for the curious.
When a task hangs, and it becomes unkillable due to this problem, it often triggers the problem in the SIQ too. But since you're not able to kill the task, you're not able to free the queue as well. At this point, you'll see OS/2 responding with a window that says more or less this "process xxx has stopped responding, do you want to end it?". This is the SIQ fix kicking in. But if you say "kill it!", OS/2 won't because it is not able to. So you're stuck in a circle, where OS/2 continually asks you if you want to kill the task, you say "yes", and nothing happens. Only way out: reboot.
This does not happen frequently, especially if you try not to use experimental software. If you have software that frequently hangs this way (i.e. it becomes unkillable) a solution sometimes is to immediately kill it with a "kill -9", without trying first with a normal kill.

Hope this helps
Bye
Cris
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 06:27:50
My only remaining problem is with Firefox - usually during shutdown (and usually if gMail is open on a tab). Firefox hangs (someplace) during shutdown, and nothing responds on the machine (WPS, xWP, etc)... a few CTRL-ESC or ALT-ESC makes the SIQ workaround notice and take action (in 5-10 seconds - but I have the "Focus Change Sensitivity" set to 5 or less - not the default 20)... once the SIQ worker notices, it will prompt me with "thread 192 (or whichever) has stopped responding, do you want to end it?" - at which time I get the "OK" and often no cancel choice. Selecting "OK" kills it, and the remnants of Firefox, (and usually frees a ton of memory - often more than is normally deallocated when Firefox shuts down normally) and all is well.

Occassionally, nothing seems to kill Firefox when it hangs... but for me, that is rare... in the instances where Firefox does hang, the kill/unkillable (requires reboot) ratio is probably 10:1.

On the rare instances Firefox is not killable, I have found that I *need* to hit C-A-D (twice1 because I have cadh installed - and it doesnt come up at all even tho the first CAD thinks it switched to it) to reboot and need to do it before I keep clicking on other things (either with the keyboard or mouse) or the system will not respond to the C-A-D keys and just beep when they are pressed, forcing a hard-power-off situation (or CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK-NUMLOCK - which has always worked for me in every lockup situation - and is easier than reaching for the power switch...)



As an interesting side note, if you do get the "Process/Thread" (whatever) has stopped responding..." message and no cancel button - but for whatever reason want to hit cancel (ie: it is a resouce/GUI hungry process that you dont want to kill, or the SIQ worker has identified the wrong app, etc), then (assuming that window has focus) simply hit the escape key. Doing so seems to do the same thing as hitting the cancel button (when it is on the dialog box).

I am kinda curious why sometimes there is - and sometimes there isn't - a cancel button... but since the escape key seems to work the same, it's not really a big deal to me...




-Rob

Note 1: When trying to bypass CADH by double pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, I find I need to hold CTRL-ALT, then press DEL, then release ALL of them and repeat to actually reboot. Oddly, holding CTRL-ALT, and hitting DEL twice (without letting go of CRTL and ALT) will not reboot any of my systems...

Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 06:39:15
Oh... there is one other thing... the HTCIGBIN.EXE that Lotus Domino Go Webserver runs to handle CGI processing is unkillable by any method I have tried (though I need to check and ensure that kill-9 support is on that machine). At least one is always unkillable by my human intervention - even after shutting down the web server - but oddly, if I want to wait for the server timeout, the server can almost always kill the hung cgi process.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 06:41:33
When firefox hangs majorly solid and requires the double CTRL-ALT-DEL it has nothing to do with the Input Queue..  it has to do with Innotek's font engine running out of system resources (basically just killing the whole graphics subsystem ).  Obviously this is why IBM never was big on anyone hooking the graphics subsystem in this way.  I've noticed that this happens more or less after long periods of uptime especially if I am reading and writing in alot of large forums (some coding forums I use, along with technical assistance sites I participate in).  I'm not saying you thought that this had anything to do with the SIQ but I can say I am 99% sure of this, since when I removed the font engine it stopped occuring.  Of course I reinstalled it because I would take a crash every month or two over unreadable small fonts on my 20" 1600x1200 display =)  (I'm sure my large display size also increases the frequency of this problem).

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 06:27:50
My only remaining problem is with Firefox - usually during shutdown (and usually if gMail is open on a tab). Firefox hangs (someplace) during shutdown, and nothing responds on the machine (WPS, xWP, etc)... a few CTRL-ESC or ALT-ESC makes the SIQ workaround notice and take action (in 5-10 seconds - but I have the "Focus Change Sensitivity" set to 5 or less - not the default 20)... once the SIQ worker notices, it will prompt me with thread 192 (or whichever) has stopped responding, do you want to end it?" - at which time I get the "OK" and often no cancel choice. Selecting "OK" kills it, and the remnants of Firefox, (and usually frees a ton of memory - often more than is normally deallocated when Firefox shuts down normally) and all is well.

Occassionally, nothing seems to kill Firefox when it hangs... but for me, that is rare... in the instances where Firefox does hang, the kill/unkillable (requires reboot) ratio is probably 10:1.

On the rare instances Firefox is not killable, I have found that I *need* to hit C-A-D (twice1 because I have cadh installed - and it doesnt come up at all even tho the first CAD thinks it switched to it) to reboot and need to do it before I keep clicking on other things (either with the keyboard or mouse) or the system will not respond to the C-A-D keys and just beep when they are pressed, forcing a hard-power-off situation (or CTRL-ALT-NUMLOCK-NUMLOCK - which has always worked for me in every lockup situation - and is easier than reaching for the power switch...)



As an interesting side note, if you do get the "Process/Thread" (whatever) has stopped responding..." message and no cancel button - but for whatever reason want to hit cancel (ie: it is a resouce/GUI hungry process that you dont want to kill, or the SIQ worker has identified the wrong app, etc), then (assuming that window has focus) simply hit the escape key. Doing so seems to do the same thing as hitting the cancel button (when it is on the dialog box).

I am kinda curious why sometimes there is - and sometimes there isn't - a cancel button... but since the escape key seems to work the same, it's not really a big deal to me...




-Rob

Note 1: When trying to bypass CADH by double pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL, I find I need to hold CTRL-ALT, then press DEL, then release ALL of them and repeat to actually reboot. Oddly, holding CTRL-ALT, and hitting DEL twice (without letting go of CRTL and ALT) will not reboot any of my systems...


Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 06:50:49
I wasnt sure what the cause was - but that does seem to fit with past experiences... some "auto-killable" Firefox issues (when it crashes all by itself - but is restartable) end up having no IFE support... but at the same time, other than non-anti-aliased fonts, FF seems to run with no further crashes, and without leaking nearly as much memory.

I find running FF with the version of IFE on this machine, if I leave it up with a few tabs open (but do nothing with it), and leave for a number of hours, I am almost always guaranteed to come back and find the machine has no physical memory left - and the swap file is growing in use massively. I have not seen that issue without IFE open (I dont think I have seen it with the other version of IFE - but that one wont install on this machine - at least not in a way that leaves the machine bootable... trying to install it leaves me in a situation where I am guaranteed to never see the desktop again - until I boot to command prompt and remove the IFE files (or replace them with the old version).

-Robert
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 06:56:35
You defiantly have some interesting hardware there.  IFE has never made my system fail to boot, though it has made it fail to run firefox before (though oddly enough other apps which used it worked fine).  I don't get any massive memory leaking if I leave firefox open, I've done so for weeks (while I was on vacation).  I would love to know why this happens on some systems and doesn't on others.  Especially since I have a big project planned and I am slowing starting to flip flop from OS/2 to XP for the platform of choice.  Most of the end user interaction will be done through browser and I really need a stable browser and while firefox/2 is more stable then any browser I have used it seems to have problems on others peoples systems (and the hardware I am using isn't easily reproducible today)   Obviously I want to come to the bottom of this since I will be providing the hardware and technical support for the project. 

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 06:50:49
I wasnt sure what the cause was - but that does seem to fit with past experiences... some "auto-killable" Firefox issues (when it crashes all by itself - but is restartable) end up having no IFE support... but at the same time, other than non-anti-aliased fonts, FF seems to run with no further crashes, and without leaking nearly as much memory.

I find running FF with the version of IFE on this machine, if I leave it up with a few tabs open (but do nothing with it), and leave for a number of hours, I am almost always guaranteed to come back and find the machine has no physical memory left - and the swap file is growing in use massively. I have not seen that issue without IFE open (I dont think I have seen it with the other version of IFE - but that one wont install on this machine - at least not in a way that leaves the machine bootable... trying to install it leaves me in a situation where I am guaranteed to never see the desktop again - until I boot to command prompt and remove the IFE files (or replace them with the old version).

-Robert

Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:03:19
I'm wondering it it is gMail causing that (with it's continuous background operations) thus calling tons of redraws through IFE thus causing it to eventually crash - all the while either IFE or some part of Firefox is using more space (caching the ever changing gMail data possibly? as if I manually kept loading page after page?)

Not sure... though I do know FF3b3 handles gMail a lot nicer (and a LOT quicker).

-Rob
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:05:22
Amusingly enough it was gmail that I had left opened, however I don't recieve a whole lot of mail on the account in question.  I have not yet tried firefox3  I used an earlier build but had abandoned it due to lack of plugin support.

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:03:19
I'm wondering it it is gMail causing that (with it's continuous background operations) thus calling tons of redraws through IFE thus causing it to eventually crash - all the while either IFE or some part of Firefox is using more space (caching the ever changing gMail data possibly? as if I manually kept loading page after page?)

Not sure... though I do know FF3b3 handles gMail a lot nicer (and a LOT quicker).

-Rob
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2008.03.20, 07:09:50
One sure-fire way to lock up Firefox and subsequently OS/2 is to click the 1-click Bid link on an ebay auction page. That cost me an item once :C Oh well, thats Firefox's support, or maybe not, but now I know about it, I dont click it anymore. IFE is rather unstable, but 2.60 beta seems to be worlds better than the 2.40 final. I wish Innotek would open the IFE so Netlabs could work its magic on it and make it not garbage, and not a cause for insane ammounts of OS/2 issues, like it currently is.

FF3 is much leaner on memory usage, though any of the Firefox will leak memory if you leave them for a while. This is a documented case, and is sorta well known. Im sure any program leaks if left running long enough though.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:10:03
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:05:22
Amusingly enough it was gmail that I had left opened, however I don't recieve a whole lot of mail on the account in question.  I have not yet tried firefox3  I used an earlier build but had abandoned it due to lack of plugin support.

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:03:19
I'm wondering it it is gMail causing that (with it's continuous background operations) thus calling tons of redraws through IFE thus causing it to eventually crash - all the while either IFE or some part of Firefox is using more space (caching the ever changing gMail data possibly? as if I manually kept loading page after page?)

Not sure... though I do know FF3b3 handles gMail a lot nicer (and a LOT quicker).

-Rob

I stopped using it for now because of lack of plugins as well - and also found it seems to screw with some things in FF2 - so when I went back to that, I was missing things like the home button, and had to go through all the "first setup" confirmations such as "you are about to leave a secure page..."

Waiting for the GA and plugins...

-Rob
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:13:00
Wow.. I just installed Firefox3 RC4 and it is quite amazing compared to my last experience with it.  The font rendering is amazing and does seem much quicker then firefox 2  (though the first load I had a sticky window resize glitch which made me kill it and reopen to fix it). 

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:10:03
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:05:22
Amusingly enough it was gmail that I had left opened, however I don't recieve a whole lot of mail on the account in question.  I have not yet tried firefox3  I used an earlier build but had abandoned it due to lack of plugin support.

Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:03:19
I'm wondering it it is gMail causing that (with it's continuous background operations) thus calling tons of redraws through IFE thus causing it to eventually crash - all the while either IFE or some part of Firefox is using more space (caching the ever changing gMail data possibly? as if I manually kept loading page after page?)

Not sure... though I do know FF3b3 handles gMail a lot nicer (and a LOT quicker).

-Rob

I stopped using it for now because of lack of plugins as well - and also found it seems to screw with some things in FF2 - so when I went back to that, I was missing things like the home button, and had to go through all the "first setup" confirmations such as "you are about to leave a secure page..."

Waiting for the GA and plugins...

-Rob
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:18:20
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:13:00
Wow.. I just installed Firefox3 RC4 and it is quite amazing compared to my last experience with it.  The font rendering is amazing and does seem much quicker then firefox 2  (though the first load I had a sticky window resize glitch which made me kill it and reopen to fix it). 

Watch gMail load ("Loading..." screen) in comparison... unless you have a decently fast machine, you should notice it takes less than half the time...

I have found a few CSS/HTML styles it honors differently than FF2 though... but other than that, I am looking forward to GA and some plugins... at least UnPlug and FireFTP and DownloadStatusBar (and a skin or two).
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:24:48


Now that we have totally hijacked this thread...
I actually never notice the "loading" screen at all.  Even in firefox 2 it just flashes by so quickly I never even notice it.  I do however notice it on my iphone while loading the classic gmail site (safari on iphone is a slow rendering dog).


Quote from: RobertM on 2008.03.20, 07:18:20
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 07:13:00
Wow.. I just installed Firefox3 RC4 and it is quite amazing compared to my last experience with it.  The font rendering is amazing and does seem much quicker then firefox 2  (though the first load I had a sticky window resize glitch which made me kill it and reopen to fix it). 

Watch gMail load ("Loading..." screen) in comparison... unless you have a decently fast machine, you should notice it takes less than half the time...

I have found a few CSS/HTML styles it honors differently than FF2 though... but other than that, I am looking forward to GA and some plugins... at least UnPlug and FireFTP and DownloadStatusBar (and a skin or two).
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: djcaetano on 2008.03.20, 15:51:46
Quote from: Robert Deed on 2008.03.20, 06:41:33
When firefox hangs majorly solid and requires the double CTRL-ALT-DEL it has nothing to do with the Input Queue..  it has to do with Innotek's font engine running out of system resources (basically just killing the whole graphics subsystem ).  Obviously this is why IBM never was big on anyone hooking the graphics subsystem in this way.  I've noticed that this happens more or less after long periods of uptime especially if I am reading and writing in alot of large forums (some coding forums I use, along with technical assistance sites I participate in).  I'm not saying you thought that this had anything to do with the SIQ but I can say I am 99% sure of this, since when I removed the font engine it stopped occuring.  Of course I reinstalled it because I would take a crash every month or two over unreadable small fonts on my 20" 1600x1200 display =)  (I'm sure my large display size also increases the frequency of this problem).

  Yeah, I noticed that IFE bugs the system. I had also noticed that xWP has some glitches yet, which also makes the system unstable sometimes (que SIQ Fix says a WPS Window or xCenter stopped to respond and if you try to kill it, the entire PMShell hangs). I had not this problems without xWP.

  But I would like to say that xWP improves a lot OS/2 and I think it's best to cope with those hangs than like without xWP.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: The Blue Warper on 2008.03.20, 17:47:47
I know this is OT, but I can confirm that FF3b3 and b4 is actually faster than FF2.x (both on WinXP and eCS). Two of the main goals which the developers aimed to are speed and an improved memory management 'engine'.
Also, for RobertM:
regarding your losing (some of) your configuration when using FF3, maybe you should set the HOME directory in the config.sys file (See Firefox/2 readme).
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2008.03.20, 18:03:28
FF 3b5 is kinda bad, its slow, uses way more RAM, and doesnt draw the page properly when you minimize\restore the page. OS\2 rears its ugly web rendering head still, the pages render slowly and eat CPU like no ones business. Also, can we get a build of Firefox without Quicksearch? Its useless, it takes away my OS2 slash and my apostrophe. Just because its a feature doesnt make it usefull damnit! lol
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: RobertM on 2008.03.21, 00:18:27
Quote from: The Blue Warper on 2008.03.20, 17:47:47

Also, for RobertM:
regarding your losing (some of) your configuration when using FF3, maybe you should set the HOME directory in the config.sys file (See Firefox/2 readme).


I have (2 years ago... entry still there)... I was beginning to think that having it may be the cause of the problem and was considering removing the entry...   :(

SET MOZILLA_HOME=C:\mozilla.org\Profiles

Other odd things it causes are FF3 will reload my current active tab set (from my last FF2 session), but on closing, because I dont have it set to store that tabset, when I load FF2 next, it will go to the default home page... but if I then close FF2 with a bunch of tabs open and reopen it, it will load the last tab set.

Maybe something I did (or was unable to do) during install is making it share the profile info? Got me...

-Rob
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2008.03.21, 00:28:21
No, I think its just differences in how FF2 and FF3 handle profile data. It acts exactly the same here when I test out FF3, all my things act like I JUST installed FF2 when I go back. I take it as a side effect of beta testing, so far, nothing has been damaged, so I dont really mind.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Robert Deed on 2008.03.21, 03:42:40
I am running FF3B4 here and it is incredibly fast compared to the most recent ff2 release.  Renders pages faster, loads faster and looks alot better.  Maybe it is having a decently supported video card :)  lol.  In fact I am monitoring my memory use by process and ff3 is using nearly the same as ff2 (it seems to fluctuate a bit from page to page) and I'm assuming FF3 has a bunch of debug code in it.

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.03.20, 18:03:28
FF 3b5 is kinda bad, its slow, uses way more RAM, and doesnt draw the page properly when you minimize\restore the page. OS\2 rears its ugly web rendering head still, the pages render slowly and eat CPU like no ones business. Also, can we get a build of Firefox without Quicksearch? Its useless, it takes away my OS2 slash and my apostrophe. Just because its a feature doesnt make it usefull damnit! lol
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Saijin_Naib on 2008.03.21, 04:07:25
FF3 Beta 5 I said, not Beta 4. Beta 4, as I noted earlier, is much improved. I was making a warning against trying Beta 5, as it, at the moment, is less than ideal.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: PAUL555 on 2008.12.20, 12:04:32

Was this single input queue issue finally fixed / bypassed in ecomstation 1.2 / 2.0 ?   

Paul   
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: Blonde Guy on 2008.12.21, 08:10:45
No. But it hasn't really been a problem since Warp 3, fixpak 17.
Title: Re: OS/2 Single Input Queue
Post by: ModZilla on 2009.03.06, 14:50:44
all of this contradictory and confusing thread spillage leads into yet another rediculous idea, for eg, google runs a bunch of crap on your system as does firefox, esp the latest version of this funky browser, also, if you check out posts (say at techweb http://www.2-spyware.com/file-xlog-exe.html and many many other hakn sites)regarding what is being tracked by MS in your machine as you try to use your machine- using the latest browser technology* , almost everything you do is traced back to within the kernel itself in windows, by processes you have no control over; so how do you know the same thing is not occuring in ecomsta? Try killing your windows explorer.  iTs silly to assume that when you are on a network that you have control over anything at all no matter what you do.