He's in the army, you know.
Something I've noticed a couple of times is how ungraceful TB is in
low-memory situations. Microsoft have things to say about this. (Most
of their own apps, and virtually all of anyone else's, fail to follow
these guidelines, but that doesn't stop them being good guidelines.)
They say it shouldn't cause loss of data, or the application to
out-right crash. The user should always be able to save to disk (disk
space allowing) and gracefully shut down the application, no matter
how tight things get. Out of memory situations happen in the real
world. A serious application has to just deal.
I'd just received some mail at one point today. I had 3 instances of
MSDEV running, about 10 browser (IE) windows, 5 or so explorer
windows, an InstallShield, 4 command prompts, 5 telnet sessions to
various places, Acrobat reader, the usual assortment of system tray
utilities and probably a few other applications too. And TB, of
course. I wasn't particularly paying attention to the number of apps
running at the time - it fitted on one row of the taskbar so I wasn't
bothered.
I read the first message (of three), no problem. I clicked on the
second, and the selection changed but the preview still showed the
first message. I tried again, no response. I clicked a different
folder. No messages in the index. I'm starting to get worried now.
Click back on Inbox, 0 messages. I notice that the Total on the folder
list was set to 0 for those two folders. Now I'm *really* worried. No
error messages of any kind have appeared so far though. I kill TB
using Task Manager because there's no *way* I'm letting it go anywhere
near the disk again until I figure out what's going on. At this point
I notice the memory usage figure of 250Mb out of a max of 250Mb. Ah.
I take a quick look in the folder directories and all appears to be
fine. I quit a whole bunch of apps, getting back down to 120Mb or so.
Re-start TB and everything's still there. *PHEW*. (Well, how many of
*you* take daily backups?)
On other occasions I've noticed that if TB *does* give an error
dialog, there's pretty much zero chance of recovery. Even after
freeing up more system memory, TB will carry on giving errors and
Access Violation boxes until you kill it and restart.
TB *really* should have noticed it was failing all over the place and
backed gracefully out of any pending operations. An error message of
some description would have been helpful at this point too.
John
--
you gave me something that i could touch in a world where i'd had too much
something i could feel with my broken hands full of lost ideals but soon i'm
returning to you my friend and we'll go where the rivers end in the silver sea
and i'll carry you if you carry me
--
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