> Yeah, I could see that, except I would have expected the 3.x clients to have
> run into a problem too.
>


Personally, I was having the same problem with the 3.x client. Though it wasn't an always repeatable occurrence.

I really don't know what the problem is but since it seems to be working
on some Win98 machines I think it would be good to test it on a fresh
one. Does anyone have a fresh 98 install (Fdisk, format, Win98) and
nothing else installed but all the drivers and stuff updated from MS.

At my humble computer level that's the first thing I would try. I am sure
you guys have already thought about doing that. but since posting is free...

Good luck !
Marc

> > > Isn't the new winsock required for boinc on 98? "no updates" might
> not
> > be a
>
> A list of DLLs, including WSOCK32.DLL, also for win9x can be found:
> here
>
> but please fist verify the file size and file date of your WSOCK32.DLL and
> make a copy of the origial
>
>
Version on this link is BSD Socket API for Windows, v. 4.00.950

the one I have is BSD Socket API for Windows 4.10.1998.

The Winsock2 update was for Windows95. Windows98 1st edition included this update. I know this because I work for a computer builder/fixer/ISP. I just had a Windows95 machine in last week that the winsock2 patch had to be applied to. Take care, and good luck in your troubleshooting.

Regards, Daniel.

> Win9x was pretty much 16 bit and did have net problems. Seems some reports of
> the problem specifically mention "contacting the server" as the root of the
> problem, and winsock came to mind.. (remember, winsock is only the interface
> to the driver, and win9x drivers could be long out of date!) (oh heck, what
> did MS call that where they munged 16bit calls into 32bit call (or vs) in the
> win9x days?

The munging of 16bit to 32bit and 32bit to 16bit was referred to as thunking.

I thought by the time Win95/98 was released, the network stacks were 32-bit. The only think I remember for sure was that GDI remained primarily 16-bit. As I recall, the coordinate systems between 16-bit and 32-bit were not quite compatible and so they had to leave it alone as not to break the majority of the applications.

Damn, I think I’m going to have to hit a used book store and find some sort of Inside Windows 98 or ME book.

Anyways, I'm not removing the network stack from the table. I just feel that if people can surf the web, BOINC should be able to do its thing.

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley

> Yeah, I could see that, except I would have expected the 3.x clients to have
> run into a problem too.
>
> Stack overflows normally scream out recursive function usage.


There's win 3.x clients? Oh my....... Oh you mean boinc 3.x! :)

Stack overflows can also mean memory corruption. Such as a bad call between 16 and 32 bit worlds..... (one side stuffs the stack, and the otherside tries to use it). This might not show as a problem based on the order of the stuff on the stack, until something is added/changed in a call in a new version...

Win9x is a weird beast 16 bit sometimes and 32 at other times!

Rom.. This is not a cut or a slam, but I really suggest that you find a box that you can load with win9x right by you to solve this. One of the GUI guys I used to work with kept 2 PC's on his desk. His "state of the art" dev machine, and the lowest performant machine suported (the IT guys kept trying to take this one away!) He'd develop the code, and when it seemed ok, he's test it on the low end box.... Then he'd look for "cheese". His term for extra prepaints or weird behavior in general. (it can't be a multi-boot, as you need the older proc and HW involved too)

Best of luck on this one...

The kinder AZ woody

> Good luck !
> Marc

yes the pros are working for a solution


Mark

you can't understand because your are a MAC user, they took a less fragile way
to manage the content table of a disk(-partition)

Only can speak for my now powered off 98er,

The situation is more than once stated above.
On a win9x system, having this situation of "frozzen", only a power off or a hard reset can reactivate the system to life.

Ok, on the next start of windows, the SCANDISK utility is started itself and most of the case solving, so there isn't really a huge problem.

But on the other side the file allocation table(s) are fragile.
Can be compared with the content table of a *huge" book. The file access is going over the content table to get the "requested page"

A corrupted FAT is a severe issue, but can be solved with special tools.

stay with you MAC and love your Darwin ..

friendly ric

>humble
with the complexity of todays computers(Hardware,Software, Network,OS) everybody is used to humble from solution to solution

Nobody knows all, all knows a piece of the puzzle, together we can survive..

> The munging of 16bit to 32bit and 32bit to 16bit was referred to as thunking.
>

That's it!

> I thought by the time Win95/98 was released, the network stacks were 32-bit.
> The only think I remember for sure was that GDI remained primarily 16-bit. As
> I recall, the coordinate systems between 16-bit and 32-bit were not quite
> compatible and so they had to leave it alone as not to break the majority of
> the applications.
>
> Damn, I think I’m going to have to hit a used book store and find some sort of
> Inside Windows 98 or ME book.
>
> Anyways, I'm not removing the network stack from the table. I just feel that
> if people can surf the web, BOINC should be able to do its thing.
>

Unless BOINC uses something in the IP stack that doesn't quite work the same way.. For example, the select() call! (not real consistant in general.....)

I hope I'm not making you chase paper tigers on this one, but think back to the beta.. There was a time that one of the firewalls (McAfee, IIRC, but might have been ZA), that had a "hook" dll that really messed up Boinc - hooked under winsockX and into the driver. This was the jan/feb timeframe - I remeber as I had to remove the firewall for a bit....)

> Stack overflows can also mean memory corruption. Such as a bad call between
> 16 and 32 bit worlds..... (one side stuffs the stack, and the otherside tries
> to use it). This might not show as a problem based on the order of the stuff
> on the stack, until something is added/changed in a call in a new version...

True.

> Win9x is a weird beast 16 bit sometimes and 32 at other times!

Oh so very true.

> Rom.. This is not a cut or a slam, but I really suggest that you find a box
> that you can load with win9x right by you to solve this. One of the GUI guys
> I used to work with kept 2 PC's on his desk. His "state of the art" dev
> machine, and the lowest performant machine suported (the IT guys kept trying
> to take this one away!) He'd develop the code, and when it seemed ok, he's
> test it on the low end box.... Then he'd look for "cheese". His term for
> extra prepaints or weird behavior in general. (it can't be a multi-boot, as
> you need the older proc and HW involved too)

Actually this is a very smart thing to do, up until two weeks ago I had 5 virtual Linux machines, Longhorn, Win95, and was in the process of trying to get Win98 and ME, all via Virtual PC 2004.

Two/three weeks ago I installed the Office 2003 service pack and it hosed my dev environment. So I had to run around and get myself VS.NET 2003, since all I had the CD’s for was 2002. Of course that accident brought home that I’m completely dependant on my home computer now and I didn’t have a good backup solution, so I bought two more HD’s and a RAID controller. Now, I’m waiting on cables, in the mean time I had cleared out my images as I was preparing to install the drives and realized my cables were too short. I had cleared out my images to reduce the size of my backups.

Sigh, fate is sometimes a cruel beast and I got caught with my pants down.

> Best of luck on this one...

Thanks...

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley

> you can't understand because your are a MAC user

I am using both. I have always had two machines at hand. One PC and one MAC.
My current tandem is a Presario 2800 laptop and an eMac. I am currently learnig
Darwin....and I miss the "real" MAC years....For me nothing will ever beat OS 9
has for stability and security. But I have to admit that XP is the best MS has ever built
and I enjoy it. My next machines will probably be a dual XEON and dual G5...
Only dreaming ! Oups I am getting of thread's topic again...

Friendly
Marc

This is for Rom,



for his effort even under hard circumstances.

> > St
> Actually this is a very smart thing to do, up until two weeks ago I had 5
> virtual Linux machines, Longhorn, Win95, and was in the process of trying to
> get Win98 and ME, all via Virtual PC 2004.



You missed the point! Get a pent 133 and load win9x on it! None of this "virutal PC stuff"! Run what real people are running!(the lowest combo) Heck, a pent 133 can probly be had for $20 these days! Running win9x on a P4 with all it's patches/updates might not tell you what users are seeing in the worst case.

Just my opinion...

Seems to me, in just my opionion, that Dev should have a series of boxes to run each client during beta and during production - one win 9x, one NT, one win2k, one winXP, one Linux, as the basic set..., as problems found locally are much easier to find/fix than those found half a world away!

Do not run these environments one at a time, but together, on their "common" HW (win9x shouldn't be on a p4, for example). That way, the devs would see first hand, atleast the first round of problemes. These don't need to be "new" boxes, but can be the desktops of those in the project! (or the "second desktop" where they might be way too slow...)

Ok.. here's how you run the process monitor in Win98

Run C:/windows/sysmon.exe

Then.. when it's running, click edit, add, select the Kernel, then select threads.

Then.. edit, add .. select memory, and 'unused memory'

then, take notes of how many threads youre using and megs of ram you have left.

let it run for a couple hours.

take notes again.

normally, the numbers vary a bit due to background tasks running and taking care of network and disk stuff. But, if there numbers continually go up over time, then you may have a memory leak, or a thread leak.

This may help to track down this WIN98 problem,
after seeing this thread I checked on my WIN98 machine, which is used solely for BOINC, nothing else loaded on this machine other than windows updates. It was locked up and had to be reset. It then ran fine for a few hours, but for no reason at all started running CPU benchmarks, It then locked up within a few seconds and never finished running benchmarks. After rebooting it started running benchmarks again and would lock up. After doing this a few times I quickly reset the project the next time it started and it finally finished running its benchmarks and did not lock up. Now the machine is running fine, but now it can't get any work so no errors without work.

Good luck figuring this out,

hope it doesn't take to long my computer has nothing to do until this gets fixed:-)

> You missed the point! Get a pent 133 and load win9x on it! None of this
> "virutal PC stuff"! Run what real people are running!(the lowest combo)
> Heck, a pent 133 can probly be had for $20 these days! Running win9x on a P4
> with all it's patches/updates might not tell you what users are seeing in the
> worst case.

Oh I got the point, I just have limited power in my apartment. I had to move one computer, and printer into my bedroom because my living room breaker was tapped out. I also have a computer in my dining room area. LOL.

I agree with you even. But for right now, I have to make do with what I have.

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley

How much memory is on the win95/98 machines?
Before my laptop gave up, with win 98 and 32 megs of ram Boinc ran dead slow.
After upgrading to 64 megs is ran normally for a amd k6 266.
This may be a mem problem.
Just a though.
Fred
Fred BOINC Alpha & BOINC Beta Tester

> Oh I got the point, I just have limited power in my apartment. I had to move
> one computer, and printer into my bedroom because my living room breaker was
> tapped out. I also have a computer in my dining room area. LOL.
>
> I agree with you even. But for right now, I have to make do with what I
> have.

Hey, unplug the microwave when you're testing! Popcorn is not good for you anyway! Plenty of power! :)

Great to hear that is being dealt with seriosly, cause my 2 win98se pc's at home are now idle.

I do have some input (hopefully usefull)

It happens with both the cli and gui proggies.

It happens EXACTLY when a WU have finished and a new 1 is started.

> Hey, unplug the microwave when you're testing! Popcorn is not good for you
> anyway! Plenty of power! :)

ROFLMAO

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley

> Great to hear that is being dealt with seriosly, cause my 2 win98se pc's at
> home are now idle.
>
> I do have some input (hopefully usefull)
>
> It happens with both the cli and gui proggies.
>
> It happens EXACTLY when a WU have finished and a new 1 is started.

Okay, so that rules out interactions with the message pump.

So I'm going to go ahead and go to sleep, the question I'm going to sleep on is, what is the similiarity between the benchmark interactions and the network I/O operations.

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley