How to avoid windows application hang/freeze ?

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Hi,

I have a windows application(UI) and a windows service.This windows application continuously calls methods in the windows service and the service does its work accordingly.The communication between UI and service is achieved by .Net remoting.

As per my application requirement, the UI should call service methods in different durations(for ex. every 1 minute) and this process should continue for 3 days(may be greater than this).

But UI is able to call methods of service for ~10-12 hrs and then UI hangs up. After I coming to office in next morning "client not working" message box is displayed with "Debug" and "Close" buttons .Once I clicked on debug which is just displaying "StackOverflowException" and no other details.

Then I started removing unnecessary objects in my code and disposing objects.Then also no use.

Please give your valuable suggestions.

Added below sample code part on 17-Nov-2014:

Adding my hunch for this problem below, please review and update my guess is correct or not.

C#

public void XXX()
{
  //Variable declaration ->10 variables(consists string,int,bool variables) 
  try
  {
    //two integer variable declaration
     TreeList selectedTreeList = (TreeList)oTabPage.Controls[0]; // treelist type is  DevExpress.XtraTreeList.TreeList 
                  
                  foreach (TreeListNode scenarioNode in selectedTreeList.Nodes)
                  {
                     
                     //Some operations
                        /* Some lines of code to perform business=>which uses newly created ~4-5 variables used in the scope*/
                     //One special case
                     if(special condition)
                     {

                     //Some lines of code to do some operations for this special     case(includes ~2-3 variable declaration)
                      
                       XXX();
                       break;
                     }
                    /* Some lines of code and also includes calls to service */
                    
                   Thread.Sleep(60000);
                   }
     //10-15 lines of code
    
  }

  catch(Exception ex)
  {
   //logging code

  }



}

Here is my suspicion:

In main method XXX(), we are calling XXX(). Like that we call XXX() in another XXX() and it goes on.This process is infinite.So each time when we call XXX(),
new variables are created and some space is allotted to them in RAM.

Note:In each XXX() method, it will take 5 minutes to enter into special condition and then calls XXX().(Assume that after 5 iterations in foreach it enters into special condition)

Shortly, I can say this whole thing as never ending recursion.

So scope of each XXX() method never ends.Hence garbage collector will not try to clear memory.So that total RAM will be filled and get StackOverflowException and then hang.

Please give your inputs.

Thanks and Regards,
Anil

Posted 12-Nov-14 16:31pm

Anil Vittal

Updated 18-Nov-14 20:13pm

v3

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PIEBALDconsult 12-Nov-14 22:48pm

You would have to show us some of the code. You must be instantiating more and more of some class and not disposing it. There are many ways this can happen.
Aside from that, a GUI application should generally not be left running for extended periods, that's generally the purpose of a Windows Service.

Anil Vittal 17-Nov-14 5:16am

Hi,
Thank you for your suggestions.
I added sample code/pseudo code for your reference as well as my hunch for the problem.

Please review.

Thanks and Regards,
Anil

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 12-Nov-14 23:00pm

Due to good weather, my access to your hard drive is somewhat limited, and all our magicians are on vacation. So, you can only get very general answer. :-)
—SA

george4986 12-Nov-14 23:58pm

good or bad weather? ;-)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 13-Nov-14 1:10am

It's fine. :-)
—SA

BillWoodruff 13-Nov-14 1:38am

When the magicians are on vacation do you have to everything by hand ? :)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 13-Nov-14 2:01am

I do everything by hand (my own hand, by the way) in all cases. You know, a magician just tells me everything that an inquirer decided to keep in secret. Probably they keep critical things in secret just because they subconsciously want to avoid getting help, preferring solving their problem themselves.
—SA

Anil Vittal 17-Nov-14 5:23am

:) Clever reply :)

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2014-11-12T17:25:00

Please see my comment to the question. So, very general ideas:

Develop appropriate architecture for your application and accurate, fault-tolerant design. If you don't know how, learn it. Learn networking, threading, remoting/WFC, exception handling and best practices.
Of course, you may have achieved part of the above. But you still have problems. You cannot move forward without analyzing your problems. And to analyze them, you need proper diagnostics. Of course, it might be totally infeasible to do testing worth of 12 hours of non-debugged execution. So, what to do? Let's discuss it.
First of all, avoid exception handling blocking exception propagation. Make sure all exception propagate up the stack, except some special cases you understand completely. (Blocking exception propagation can be used, for example, to compensate for defects of some libraries without open source code, which you cannot patch.)
When this is done, catch all the exception on the very top stack frame of each thread, and, possibly, in some main processing loops. In the point where all the exceptions are caught, add code writing application logs with appropriate exception information.
Also, add logging to some other point which seem to be suspicious to you. This is usually done on some next iterations of your research.
What exception information should be collected and put to log. First of all, full type name, exception message, data dictionary, inner exceptions, recursively. Please see, in particular:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.exception%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.exception.data(v=vs.110).aspx[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.exception.innerexception(v=vs.110).aspx[^].

And now I'm mentioning most important part most critical for diagnostics: exception call stack: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.exception.stacktrace(v=vs.110).aspx[^].
How to do the logging? First of all, use the system log via the class System.Diagnostics.EventLog:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.eventlog%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[^].

See also my past answers on EventLog:
How to create event log under a folder[^],
MsBuild OutPut to the TextBox on the fly in Windows Application[^].

Another option is the popular 3rd-party open-source product Apache log4net:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4j#Ports[^],
http://logging.apache.org/log4net[^].
To get help, learn to ask appropriate informative question and provide relevant information. Right now, you don't have a clue, it looks like. Not too worry: it can be learned, too. :-)

Good luck.

—SA

Sathish Balaiah · Answer 2 · 2014-11-16T23:39:00

Solution 2

You are trying to periodically invoke a windows service periodically through a UI appl. Is there a reason why you opted for windows application (UI). Why don't you convert this to a console app.

Posted 16-Nov-14 23:39pm

Sathish Balaiah

Comments

Anil Vittal 17-Nov-14 7:28am

Hi Sathish,

Basically that is my application requirement. UI is there for controlling runs.
User opens a script and runs it for the time he requires.Then he stops.He can also create new scripts using UI and performs runs.In between if he does not satisfy with the values ,then he stops it and then changes values and performs run.That script execution time
depends on his requirement.He may opt for infinite time(if script need to run for long time).So it runs on weekend and next week morning he simply stops it and analyzes the results.In this process my UI hanging up.

Note:So in a run, my windows service is called periodically from UI to pass data present in the script.Service performs required things for given data.

Thanks and Regards,
Anil

How to avoid windows application hang/freeze ?

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