Newsgator Forums / FeedDemon 2.6.1 Beta / Beta Forums / FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray / Latest Posts

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Will — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 06:38:26 GMT

It was a FeedDemon newspaper. I use an external browser for reading everything else.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Nick Bradbury — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:21:32 GMT

[quote][b]Will (4/22/2008)[/b][hr]I have now noticed the freeze on a page other than the Subscriptions page after a long wait. Seems to happen after having multiple updates performed while minimized.[/quote]

Did the freeze happen when viewing a FeedDemon newspaper, or was an external web page showing?

Thanks,

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Will — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:33:17 GMT

Same here, XP Pro SP2. 1.25GB RAM.

I have now noticed the freeze on a page other than the Subscriptions page after a long wait. Seems to happen after having multiple updates performed while minimized.

I have a total of 13 folders, 120 feeds with 12795 items, 0 unread items and 1309 flagged items. I also have 11 active watches and 12 clippings folders.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:11:06 GMT

Thanks for the update Nick! Just FYI: I'm using XP Pro, so it couldn't have been a Vista problem anyway. Let me/us know if there is any way I/we can help.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Nick Bradbury — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:34:52 GMT

I'm afraid I'm still not having any luck reproducing this problem. I thought it might be specific to Vista, since my Vista system has been notorious for unexplained freezes, but restoring a minimized FeedDemon on Vista showed no delay (this is Vista SP1, FWIW). Same with Win98, 2000 and XP.

I'll keep looking into this - just wanted to let everyone here know that I hadn't forgotten about the problem.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Nick Bradbury — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:49:53 GMT

[quote][b]Will (4/16/2008)[/b][hr]I can verify those results. I opened FD from the system tray after a night of updates and there was no freeze. I had it on an empty folder newspaper instead of the Subscriptions newspaper. Looks like something associated with that view.[/quote]

Thanks for the detective work, guys - I'm looking into this now.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Will — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 07:08:03 GMT

I can verify those results. I opened FD from the system tray after a night of updates and there was no freeze. I had it on an empty folder newspaper instead of the Subscriptions newspaper. Looks like something associated with that view.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:31:51 GMT

This morning I opened FD without *any* freeze. Two tabs were open, with sites in them. The only significant difference I can think of is that I didn't have any FD generated pages open (feed view or subscription view). Any other tests I could do?

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Spyder — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:12:02 GMT

[quote][b]Nick Bradbury (4/15/2008)[/b][hr]My previous statement about memory use was a simplification - there's actually more to it.[/quote]
Yeah I figured as much, I was just throwing ideas out there.

[quote][b]Nick Bradbury (4/15/2008)[/b][hr]My next best guess is that the freeze is related to the browser (I say that because the embedded browser is often the culprit behind other issues). Do you have a lot of browser tabs open when you see the freeze?[/quote]
Browser causing it makes sense, because loading that from swap on the wrong thread could cause windows to lock up. I'm an external browser man and I've seen similar behaviour so it might not be the tabs. Then again I never had a 7 second lockup, but my machine is pretty well tuned.

It sounds like the fastest way to track this down is find out which windows message is being blocked and freezing the system, then work backwards from there. If it was a visual studio app you could use spy++ but that's obviously out... a quick google turned up [url=http://www.windows-spy.com/]winspector[/url] which appears to do mostly the same thing. I'm really not sure what info you'll need to track this down in a delphi app :(

Here's an idea - download Virtual PC now that it's free, and create a VM with ram requirements equal to or bigger than your system ram. Minimise FD, and try to load the VM - it will fail, but unless they've fixed the bug it will instantly dump every app into swap trying to free up ram. Then, while your hdd is churning to keep up, restore FD. That should be a nice easy extreme replication case.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:28:32 GMT

I think I had about 10 browser tabs open when it happened. I will try again with just 1 browser tab open all night and then report back :) I'm using the IE6 engine by the way.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Nick Bradbury — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:05:07 GMT

[quote][b]Spyder (4/14/2008)[/b][hr]So you don't flush regular newspapers? How about if I restore FD and immediately click a different feed or folder - would that trigger it?[/quote]

My previous statement about memory use was a simplification - there's actually more to it. Really, the performance hit I was referring to is simply that FD will reload the subscription report when it's restored if new posts were retrieved while it was minimized. It sounds like something else is going on here, though, since the previous poster says that the delay happens even when the subscription report isn't showing.

My next best guess is that the freeze is related to the browser (I say that because the embedded browser is often the culprit behind other issues). Do you have a lot of browser tabs open when you see the freeze?

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:24:00 GMT

Just FYI: FD showed the same behavior this morning - 7 seconds freeze (couldn't move the mouse). The tab that was open only showed 1 Dilbert cartoon in Newspaper view.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Spyder — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:45:21 GMT

I have 130 feeds total. I almost never use the subscription report, but then I don't see the issue much anymore now that I'm using FD soley on my beefy work machine with 3gb ram.

So you don't flush regular newspapers? How about if I restore FD and immediately click a different feed or folder - would that trigger it?

Might be best to let the OS handle the memory, or at least reload the data on a background thread ;)

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:45:10 GMT

Almost 50 feeds displayed in that screen. I will try to minimize with a different tab tonight and open tomorrow morning and see how it differs.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Nick Bradbury — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:51:46 GMT

I believe what you're seeing is due to FeedDemon "flushing" all loaded feeds from memory when you minimize the application, and then re-loading some of that feed data when you restore the application so that it can rebuild the "Subscription" report. You can verify whether this is the problem by displaying something other than the Subscription report, then minimizing and restoring the application.

Of course, I didn't expect that this would freeze everything for several seconds. How many feeds (approx) do you have displayed on the Subscription report?

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Spyder — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:39:48 GMT

nah but you will see your HDD thrashing. I don't know what API FeedDemon is blocking, but it's loading everything while blocking it. I've also seen something similar when clicking on a new feed, if FeedDemon has been open but not the active app for ages. My guess is it's related to loading MSXML back into ram but that's just wild speculation based on when I've seen it.

I always figured it was a windows issue so didn't report it, but having been thinking about memory usage at work recently I realise it could possibly be avoided.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:48:43 GMT

But how come it freezes the system? I can understand that it would freeze the program - lots of programs take a while to load if you haven't used them for a while, but the system? Weird thing is that I don't see a CPU spike when it happens either.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Spyder — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:50:00 GMT

it's not the video card - it happens whenever FD is swapped out of ram. You could load a big virtual machine and the next time you click on FD it'll happen.

It bugs me occasionally, but I'm not sure if this is Nick's fault or not. Maybe FD is doing some major work in the window_activate method that needs to load everything out of the swapfile, and the OS waits for that method to return before un-freezing the system? It's a weird one.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:18:54 GMT

Load on the video card? That sounds odd. I don't see this behavior with any other program (I'm running quite a lot) and I don't use a 2nd monitor. My video card is an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS/XT (256 MB) and I have 2GB of RAM on XP Pro.

RE: FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Will — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:00:55 GMT

I have the same issue. I have reported it in the past and it has something to do with the load on the video card. I notice it when using my laptop with a 2nd monitor. If I am only using the laptop screen then I do not have the same problem.

FeedDemon freezes when opening it from the systray

Change — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 04:06:06 GMT

When I start FeedDemon everything's fine, but once I'm done reading I like to minimize it to the system tray in order to keep updated about new items. If I open FeedDemon from there after a long time (say one day), it shows an empty (white) browser area, freezes the computer for about 5 seconds and then shows the subscriptions in the browser area. During the time the computer is frozen, I cannot move the mouse.

Is this reproducible by you and/or intended behavior?