Romex Software Forum

It seems, that since installation of Fancycache (a few days) I experience a deadlock time to time.

Experienced the dead-lock during normal runtime (twice, so far). Symptoms are following:
Once it occurred I could normaly switch apps by alt-tab, I could move the mouse, I could move the application windows but as soon as I tried to do ANYTHING inside any the applciation, application got stuck.
It was not possible to start taskmanager or do anything else. (Like use ctrl-alt-del and invoke logoff or anything like that.)
It seems, that each function (/application) was getting stuck, when there was some disk activity needed. (Loading some module, DLL, etc.)
When it occurred all disk activity stopped.

I experienced this right after boot and logon attempt. (Several times.)
After logon, I got after several seconds with "Applying your personal settings". (Imho loading of the profile.)
Symptoms were pretty the same... I could move mouse pointer there and fore, move progress window around the screen, but that's it.
Disk activity was stopped. (During the logon, there should be a LOT of disk activity...)

Overally it looks that system is waiting for something (to be delivered from disk) but this request is never fulfilled. (Neither rejected/failed... it's just indefinite waiting.)

Till now it occurred when I had active L2 caching or deferred writes. I'll update you when I'll have some news or details.

Anyone else experienced this?

--Lukas

Update... hopefully it helps a bit...
now it heppend even with L2 cache and deferred writes disabled.

Luckily I had running Fancycache GUI running, so I could stop the cache. As soon as I did this, everything returned to normal and started to be reactive again.

Some details about the system:
wxp sp3, 32b, 4GB ram
Running MS Security Essentials and AV software
Running latest Romex Ramdisk free edition (using 508MB of invisible memory)
Running Romex Fancycache for disks (not using invisible memory)
Installed Acronis trueimage (probably using some file system filter driver.)
Installed Citrix Streaming Client (a.k.a. Citrix offline plugin 6.0) (using file system filter driver)


Disk0: normal disk (4 partitions): C: (NTFS; on 2nd partition) + F: (NTFS; on 4th partition). Partitions are crosslinked using junction poitns. <-- cache enabled, 512 MB
Disk1: Romex ramdisk (1 partition): Z: (NTFS; 512MB) <-- cache disabled

--Lukas

Hi,

Thank you for your bug report!

We'll try to reproudce the issue. I wonder the problem might be related to the junction points. we'll check it.

I'll try to enable manual bugcheck thus I might be able to give you a memory dump...
(...And I'll be hoping, that the deadlock will not prevent me to create the dump... btw: If this would be a case, can you make your driver to be not active during the bugcheck?)

--Lukas

Thank you very much for your kind support.

Generally, Windows won't generate a memory dump file for deadlock. I don't know what you mean by "manual" bugcheck. Is it to force a memory dump? Becasue I want to make sure that the memory dump file contains the information about deadlock. Thanks.

Yep, I ment this:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244139

... and my question was if FC will interfere with that process or not

But I'll see4, I'll test

--Lukas

Hi,

Thanks for your information.

I'm not sure if FC interfere with it. Generally I think it does because the write commands will pass through FC.

PS. could you pls check the below values in the registry?
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINES\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4d36e967-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}
UpperFilters
LowerFilters

Thanks.

UpperFilters=
FancyCcD
PartMgr

LowerFilters is "Not defined".

btw: it would be great if there would be created FC-specific PerfMon metrics. (It would help me better to monitor and evalutate performance benefits on serves in mid/long term.)

--Lukas

Thanks.

Regarding the FC-specific PerfMon metrics, the program was initially designed to provide its own interface to show statistics data (it also works in long term), because a lot of users don't know how to use Windows PerfMon and add items to be monitored.
We'll consider to provide both interfaces if the performance is not affected much when monitor is on.

I agree, Perfmon UI is terrible.

However there are numerous 3rd party tools, which enable metrics reading, interpretation and reporting on these.

I can use built-in tool on my laptop.
But I cannot effectively use it on server, which works and provides services even if I am not logged-on or I am not watching it.
(Not mentioning situations with 50 or 500 servers...)