Troubleshooting crashes

[jgreen1024]

I've had a number of problems with my SageTV server crashing recently. It seems like this started happening the last time I updated my plugins, but I can't be positive about that. Does anyone have tips for turning on appropriate debug logging that might help locate the source of the crash? I'm hoping it might be a plugin that I could simply disable and thus immediately make my wife happy again. She has been putting on the pressure to bring back Tivo.

Attached are a couple crash logs from my most recent crashes - I'm a reasonably OK C programmer, but Java is outside my realm of experience. Does this mean anything to anyone? The December 31 crash left a core dump (700MB+) but I don't really know what to do with it although I'm willing to learn some Java.

[BobPhoenix]

I would first try to remove all of your images from the image caches that your plugins have. If that doesn't work remove all of the plugins and go back to completely stock GUI. If that works then add your plugins one at a time and run that way until you are satisfied it is working then add the next and repeat. If you get back to what you had (as in all your plugins are reinstalled) and you have no problems then maybe you will have to do this periodically.

[brewston]

I've seen the first one - the crash in ImageLoader.dll - Does that happen when browsing through fanart by any chance ?

I worked around it with a VB script which auto restarted Sage service

But since I've moved to Phoenix 2 (I was getting the crash on Phoenix) I've not seen it since

What STV are you using ? and what are you doing when the crash happens ?

[jgreen1024]

Thanks for the suggestions. There doesn't seem to be anything in particular that triggers these crashes - they have happened when all the TVs were off and nobody was touching anything. Does the auto-screensaver that plays random images from my photo library also use ImageLoader.dll? If so, that's what all the boxes were doing.

I am using Gemstone as the STV, but I am not wed to it and will happily switch to something else if there's a better alternative. As for fanart, I have "Phoenix Fanart" installed, but to be honest I'm not really sure we make use of any of it. When my wife/kids select movies to watch, it's always from a folder view where no graphics are displayed anyway. I could probably just delete those plugins.

I'll do some experimenting and see what happens. Thanks again.

[brewston]

I can't remember the options as I'm at work but can't you change the screensaver to blank screen ? That would help narrow it down.

[jgreen1024]

Got a new one last night, with debug logging enabled. It does seem like the crash has something to do with reading photos for the screensaver. Note in "debug_log.txt" that it's running along happily loading images until 01:18:10 when it tries to load a file called CRW_0330.jpg. That fails for some reason, and in the space of the next second, it appears to retry loading that image maybe 100 times, each time failing.

The end of this logfile comes at the same time the attached crash log was generated.

I verified this morning that if I manually browse to this photo within SageTV using the Photos menu, it displays just fine and does not crash. Although I note in the debug log, the thread that appears to do this is "ReProcessHook" and not "FinalRender" as appears just before the crash.

Any further ideas? Kind of makes me think it's not a plugin after all.

[jgreen1024]

Quick followup: I downgraded Java on the machine back to whatever the last 6.x release was, and have not experienced any crashes in a 2-3 week period. I'm not prepared to declare victory yet, but it does seem to be a positive sign.

Go figure.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by jgreen1024

Quick followup: I downgraded Java on the machine back to whatever the last 6.x release was, and have not experienced any crashes in a 2-3 week period. I'm not prepared to declare victory yet, but it does seem to be a positive sign.

Go figure.

That means that if you had Installed Java 7 it was probably screwed up maybe you forgot to shutdown Sage Properly or did not Install visuall c/++ 32 bit correctly. Problems Installing java is mostly due to operator error.