My program "Hangs" all of XP pro - how to troubleshoot?

[Roy Terry]

Hello,
We are using XP Pro as a platform
for high-volume data collection. Our
system was hanging after about 15 hours
so I began investigating and came up with
a program that hangs XP in about 45 minutes.
All it does is create about 300 files per second.
and eventually all of XP grinds to a halt: new processes
can't be started, taskbar is dead, etc. And this is not
because the system is running out of disk space - far
from it.

I would think no legal application should be able
to cripple xp pro in this way. Can anyone suggests
steps to further investigate/solve this?


The crash demo program is written in Tcl which
is simply a scripting library based on C language
DLL. I posted the actualy program and details
on comp.lang.tcl Google link here:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group...84676ea8063/de4c88378e4fa1ce#de4c88378e4fa1ce


Any suggestions to debug this would be greatly
appreciated.

Thanks,
Roy Terry

 

[Guest]

Any/All programs/software can hang xp if thier not written correctly or
if thier not compatable,does it carry the xp logo ?Has it gone thru WHQL,
is it or does it carry digital signature.Try bringing up the topics at the
mfg
web site,look for "contact us"...

 

[Roy Terry]

Any/All programs/software can hang xp if thier not written correctly or
if thier not compatable,does it carry the xp logo ?Has it gone thru WHQL,
is it or does it carry digital signature.Try bringing up the topics at the
mfg
web site,look for "contact us"...

Wow that seems a pretty low estimate of the quality goals for XP.
Anyhow I wrote the program so no it has no logo :*)
Do you have any sort of documentation of XP vulnerabilities such
that any program could hang it?

Thanks,
Roy

 

[Roy Terry]

Hello,
We are using XP Pro as a platform
for high-volume data collection. Our
system was hanging after about 15 hours
so I began investigating and came up with
a program that hangs XP in about 45 minutes.
All it does is create about 300 files per second.
and eventually all of XP grinds to a halt: new processes
can't be started, taskbar is dead, etc. And this is not
because the system is running out of disk space - far
from it.

I would think no legal application should be able
to cripple xp pro in this way. Can anyone suggests
steps to further investigate/solve this?

UPDATE: 13 April 2005 (about 1 month since OP)

Working with MS support we identified the apparent failure
mode and 1 culprit but others remain.
On one simple IDE-equipped system the captured
memory dump showed that the OS was running
critically low of "Free System Page Table Entries"
The culprit according to MS was the Intel Application Accelerator
which installs idechndr.sys as a driver. Removing this
component indeed solved the problem on the
specific test system.

The problem still remains under investigation on
other systems where no such driver is found yet
monitoring does show a precipitous decline in FSPTe's
The problem does not occur on SP1, only SP2 so far.

To be continued....
Roy