Rob,
  Yeah, I thought of that one, but the weirdness seems to show up a bit
sooner than that.

  Having said that, it could still be a contender 'coz I'm not sure that I
am getting true information on whether the up time is for the app or for the
OS.  So it may be that SOMETIMES a restart only of the app fixes the
problem.


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Robert martin
Sent: Monday, 14 May 2007 9:18 a.m.
To: NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi List
Subject: Re: [DUG] Long running apps & weirdness

Hi

We had a problem years ago where we were using GetTickCount, and after a 
while (38 days I think) the system has done enough ticks and rolls 
over.  This used to cause us problems, although yours look weird (ours 
were fairly obvious). 

One question.  Once said weirdness happens, does a restart of the app 
fix the problem or does windows need to be restarted?

Rob Martin
Software Engineer

phone +64 03 377 0495
fax   +64 03 377 0496
web www.chreos.com

Wild Software Ltd



Trevor Jones wrote:
> Hello,
>   Just wondering if any of you have encountered really weird bugs and
> support issues on machines that have been running for a long time (without
a
> reboot).
>
>   Recently, I have noticed that we have been getting support calls for
> strange app behaviour.  The kind of things that are being reported as
going
> wrong make no sense whatsoever.
>
>   My first thought was that there might be a memory leak in my app, but
> further investigation shows that there are none.
>
>   There is no consistency to any of the reported faults, apart from the
fact
> that they are all "weird".  In each case, the app and the OS have an
up-time
> of more than 2 weeks. Often, the up-time is less than that required to
cause
> a bug with the roll-over of GetTickCount, so I can dismiss that.
>
>   A reboot of the OS (or a restart of the app) always fixes any of the
> weirdness.
>
>   The app is built with D2006.
>
>   The OS is XP embedded (and I have no idea which bits it includes and
which
> bits are left out from regular XP).
>
>   The hardware is bargain-basement stuff, but so far, no blue screens, so
I
> probably can't blame the graphics cards, keyboards or mice.
>
>   Over 1500 machines, we get about 3 or 4 reports a week of the Delphi app
> misbehaving, so it doesn't sound like my fault (which in itself is
unusual).
>
>   All of the machines were purchased in November 2006, so there could be
> some kind of burn-in time problem.
>
>   I have no idea what to say to the customer other than to blame it all on
> the hardware (as any programmer should), and say that they probably have
> defective RAM.
>
>   At a guess, I would say that my Delphi app has exhibited weirdness on
less
> than 1% of the installed base, but even at that level, I have to come up
> with answers.  I have none.
>
>   Should I say that you shouldn't let a Windows system run for longer than
a
> week without rebooting? (I hate to blame MS).
>
>   I suspect that the reason that my own dev machine is so stable is
because
> Windows Automatic Update requires a reboot every few days as each new
update
> becomes available.
>
>   Do you have a suggestion?
>
> Trevor
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