newsbin.com

I have noticed that when I run Newsbin continously for longer periods, it slows down. Permanently deleting posts will take longer time, as well as adding files to the download list. During these operations, Newsbin will sometimes lockup temporarily, so the download stops. It also used to take up a lot of memory, but it seems fixed in the newest versions of Newsbin. This gets to the annoying state when I have downloaded about 50 GB during a session.

Does anyone know if this is a wine problem or a Newsbin problem?

A little bit about my setup, as it is a bit complex. I am running Newsbin 5.33 build 7737 on wine-0.9.30. And this is running in an i386 Debian sid chroot on an amd64 Debian testing system with kernel 2.6.17-2-amd64. When I take the time to reboot the machine, it will be kernel 2.6.18-4-amd64.

EDIT: I am running Newsbin in a VNC window if that means anything.

Another issue, that may be related. The permanent delete function does not seem to work for me. The posts will disappear from the list, but they can later be found by the search function. And if I close down Newsbin and start it again, posts that was deleted permanently but are newer than MPA will still show up. Is this related, or did I just make a mistake when configuring Newsbin?

/Jacob

Lets say there is. The next step would be to see if it happens in Windows too. If not, then it's a wine problem, if it does then maybe it's a Newsbin problem.

Honestly, I personally wouldn't look at wine as a serious option for running something as if it was a service(i.e. for long periods of time moving lots of data). That it works at all is surprise enough. For me it runs fine as an interactive process over a few hours, perhaps, but I'll admit to never having left it running long term simply because we're running a grid and don't leave systems logged in when unused.

I have some problems with speed with the more recent point releases whenever I'm marking posts as read - if you aren't already, try starting NB on the command line and you'll likely notice thousands upon thousands of crap messages crop up while you're doing GUI actions. It gets so intense, even if started with an icon, it's actually interfering with the speed. One tip is when you're marking posts, be sure to *not* have the tab as the focus - select another tab that covers it up while it's marking. This increases speed for me. This spew behaviour is known to Quade, but as with all things wine, it takes a rear line to the officially supported platform.

You might be experiencing a different thing, though. As far as your overall environment, I personally doubt it's kernel related, although wine version is possible. Even a real windows install running NB for long periods tends to swap out stuff(why we love linux! ), so I'm unsure how that would manifest in wine, if at all. Also, if there's any way to leave VNC out of the equation for test purposes that would probably be educational.

In short, it's good to hear your post for informational purposes - definitely post back if you find a solution. Other than what I mentioned I don't have much else for you though. Perhaps someone else running wine like you will chime in. Also, perhaps do a googly for "long wine sessions" and see if it's a known wine issue(although be sure to qualify what sort of wine ).

DT

Get dex a decent sampling list of the messages and make sure he gives them too me. There's just no that much to selecting posts for instance. There's nothing I actually do.

Can't you turn the logging levels down?

Quade wrote:Can't you turn the logging levels down?

There is the WINEDEBUG environment variable. For example:

WINEDEBUG=fixme-actctx wine nbpro.exe

will silnce all "fixme:actctx" messages (and leave other fixme messages)

WINEDEBUG=fixme-all wine nbpro.exe

will silence all "fixme" message (and leave "err" messages ).

WINEDEBUG=-all wine nbpro.exe

will silence everything.

So I finally got my Windows machine booted. I cannot say anything conclusive about the leak problem yet, I need to run the test for a few days for that, but I just wanted to post a few observations while they are fresh.

I installed a fresh copy of Newsbin 5.33 build 7737 on a relatively fresh Windows XP SP2. It's been a while since I ran it on Windows, so I was surprised about a few things that I had attributed to Wine. But I also confirmed a few things with wine.

When I delete posts permanently, the computer will be processing for a while after the list is updated. This happens both on wine and in Windows. I assume this is some sort of background processing designed to make Newsbin seem faster even in huge newsgroups. This also makes sorting of a newsgroup a lot faster, but if I then add the remaining posts to the download list, Newsbin will hang without updating the GUI until the deleting of posts is done. But as far as I remember, this used to also happen when deleting posts...

The time it takes to delete posts and add to the download list seems to take just as long on windows as it does on wine. I would have assumed that native windows would be faster, but that is not the case.

When I download files in wine, the group display of those files will be flashing because the list of posts is refreshing all the time. This must either be a bug in wine or a missing function. It will use a little bit of CPU, so I will normally make sure that it is not showing a group when downloading.

Deleting posts permanently will place the cursor at the top of the list in wine, but in windows, the cursor will be placed on the next post. This can be bypassed in wine by using page-up and page-down for the first navigation. Is this because Newsbin uses a special feature of the list view in use in order to keep track of the cursor?

/Jacob

Newsbin isn't released on Linux. Wine does a passable job of running many windows programs. Any differences you see between the two are as a result of wine, that's that. Quade tries to address any outstanding problems(like things that cause lockups), but in the end, it's unsupported on Linux. If something acts a little odd in wine, it's not because of special features that NB uses, it's because there's lots of little corners of wine that don't work properly. And there's lots.

There's no reason to assume NB/wine should be any slower than windows for core functions like loading files or doing sorts. Wine Is Not an Emulator, remember? The only things that tend to run slower are graphics.

DT

Deleting posts and adding posts to download both access the same files and read/write RV2 files. Basically doing a massive "mark old" and adding files to the download list is pretty close to worst case processing wise.

Dex passed me some of the error messages wine's reporting and I have no clue what they are or what they mean. I was hoping someone could post them to a wine list/forum and get an explaination of what causes them and what they really mean.

As far as I've been able to ascertain, it's related to explorer. I can't really explain why it constantly spits them out, though. I do know that sometimes starting NB seems to "lock up" the wineserver when it's trying to load explorer. Killing and restarting the wine session fixes it. Maybe the entire wine session is getting hung up on not finding explorer, dunno.

At this point I see it for what it is - a "fixme" scream to the wine dev team.

DT

I was under the impression you got this even when the MOTD was disabled. I don't actually use Explorer internally for anything. I think it sounds more like focus changing in the app. Like window focus is shifting around. I'd also suspect it might have something to do with how I draw the lower progress bars.

All of the lists use "Custom Draw" (for the colors and shading). That's really the only unusual thing about them. I wonder if that's related.

That's an oddity. I definitely disable MOTD and I know for a fact wine + Newsbin tries to run explorer.exe during startup, ever so briefly. Huh.

I suspect it's GUI related too - it's just that all threads I've found gabbing about that message relate to explorer, and I see explorer there on startup...

DT

I just completed the test I was running, and it looks like some of my problems are actually caused by Newsbin and not wine, although wine is making it worse. When I delete posts permanently on Windows, some of them will show up again if I shut down and restart Newsbin. On wine, all the deleted posts show up again. I'm guessing this is what causes the slowdown because the groups I monitor are heavy on traffic, and this will quickly accumulate a lot of posts on the lists.

But as I said, I still see some of this on Windows. Has anybody else seen this behaviour?

If you want to save some ram in high traffic groups. "Max Post Age" is the way to do it. Delete doesn't actually delete anything though, if you use "Shift-Delete" they're never loaded into memory again. Regular delete just marks them "read" though they're still loaded.

So far, I'm not really hearing anything that sounds like a "Leak".

I guess you are right that it is not an actual leak. In any case, I am not having memory problems. There are 4GB in the machine I normally use for Newsbin, and my MPA is only 7 days. The reason I use permanent delete (shift-del) is that it is my way of sorting through the content of the newsgroups.

The problem that I see both on Windows and Linux is that posts I have deleted with shift-del are still present when I shut down Newsbin and start it up again.

Just a related question. When are the posts deleted from memory? Can I just close the group, or do I have to restart Newsbin?

If you close the post tab, they're cleared out of memory.