Thread: List building on initialization, intermittent working

Well, I decided to test how long it might take to hit some of the points. Specifically for this first test I set the breakpoint on the next line in the settings plugin after the line "if(function==eFunction.pluginLoadingComplete).... " to correspond to when the plugin loading is complete. I let OM run, loading up with the android skin, and it took 11 minutes and some odd seconds to hit that line... I sure hope I can figure out a way to improve that speed. At least I know it's just something that needs to run longer than I am used to for the time being.

I suspect the same thing for the indexing music problem, and I bet time will fix that as well.

Just implemented a simple text line so I can at least see when the plugins loading are complete, so atm it's working but not optimal.

EDIT: Just found something else, just not sure what thread/code might be causing it. I have noticed that if the plugins don't load within the first so many seconds (like 5ish) of OM starting, I will get the dreaded ContextSwitchDeadlock error. Now time to track this down:

The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0xecc18 to COM context 0xecaa8 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.

I'm pretty new to OM development, and I ran into a similar issue a few days ago. A thread was spinning in a while loop slowing the app to a crawl. I had to change Thread.Sleep(0) to Thread.Sleep(5) to give other OS threads some CPU time. FrontEnd\OpenMobile.Graphics\Platform\Windows\WinRawInput.cs:67

Hey guys. Borte is on the road with his job. But he promised to try and get on here (perhaps later today) to offer up any advice.

Cheers,
John

Seems like it wouldn't be right if we had to rebuild the graphics.dll for skins... too much hassle for other users I think anyways.

I wonder about my gesture code on the ui level though... the first 2 gestures never run code but the 3rd+ always will. I forget what arguments are null in the first attempts, but after work ill debug and find out.

EDIT: The lists are aggravating. I've went back to the defaults on ui, main menu, settings, and music. I then replaced, 1 at a time, each plugin with my own modified ones. Testing with only 1 modified plugin each time, the lists were still intermittent in the building and executing. Deleted all the extra debugging files that get built into the folder, still didn't help. The only threads I can see spawning in my code are 2 queuetasks, 1 in the settings and one in the music plugins.

I'm at the point where I will start building up the graphics library just to try the sleep change that was posted above...

Well, I have no idea what is going on tbh. I took out the settings plugin, and left just the music, ui, and main menu to deal with. I added a couple .doevents() (which I don't like to use and might try without), and changed the threading.queuetask() in the music to just a straight safethread.asynchronous(), and so far, my music has loaded successfully 10/10 debugging starts. Wierd, I think so, but at least for now I'll keep it changed and keep going with the skin.

Edit: I still get the CLR error, but now at least it has no effect on my music list building .

Based on what I've read so far it sounds like a timing problem (or a crashing plugin but I think you ruled that out when adding them back in one by one). I've encountered a few of those earlier and in the latest code quite a lot of changes to correct these issues has been done (After all timing shouldn't affect the application in any manner!). I'll look over the code to see if I can find anything that would cause the problems described.

Originally Posted by detlion1643

Well, I have no idea what is going on tbh. I took out the settings plugin, and left just the music, ui, and main menu to deal with. I added a couple .doevents() (which I don't like to use and might try without), and changed the threading.queuetask() in the music to just a straight safethread.asynchronous(), and so far, my music has loaded successfully 10/10 debugging starts. Wierd, I think so, but at least for now I'll keep it changed and keep going with the skin.

Where did you find the "threading.queuetask()" code? I searched all the code for OM but can't find any reference to it?

Originally Posted by Efess

I'm pretty new to OM development, and I ran into a similar issue a few days ago. A thread was spinning in a while loop slowing the app to a crawl. I had to change Thread.Sleep(0) to Thread.Sleep(5) to give other OS threads some CPU time. FrontEnd\OpenMobile.Graphics\Platform\Windows\WinRawInput.cs:67

Changing it from Sleep(0) to Sleep(5) shouldn't really do anything for other tasks as the code Thread.Sleep(0) is basically the same as DoEvents(). It would affect the local thread though slowing it down. But the only thing the code that you're referring to (line 67) is waiting for the mouse or keyboard driver to start, so changing it to 5 instead of 0 won't cause any problems.
This is from MSDN regarding Sleep(0):

Specify zero (0) to indicate that this thread should be suspended to allow
other waiting threads to execute.

Rebuilding the Graphics.Dll is not something that is required or should be done when working with skins.

EDIT: My apologies, it was threading.taskmanager.queuetask().

Taken straight out of newMedia.dll:

Code:

OpenMobile.Threading.TaskManager.QueueTask(delegate() { loadArtists(); }, ePriority.High, "Load Artists");

and out of OMSettings.dll:

Code:

 OpenMobile.Threading.TaskManager.QueueTask(new OpenMobile.Threading.Function(loadPluginSettings), ePriority.Normal,"Load Plugin Settings");

Now, I don't use the OMSettings.dll anymore, whether modified or not... I'm building up a different way to include settings that works more like how Android works. But, changing the first code line to use

Code:

**I don't have my exact code in front me,  but something like this:
SafeThread.Asynchronous(delegate() { loadArtists(); }, theHost);

has loaded the music correctly every time with no CLR waiting errors.

Ok. thanks I'll have a look.

Btw: I didn't find it since I just searched for the posted code: "queuetask" instead of "queuetask"... lol I should have seen the typo.