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View Full Version : Crash issues and better crash handling needed



Dachannien
June 11th, 2007, 22:52
I've had a couple of cases where, after a few hours of play with lots of FG objects open (personality sheets, maps, tokens, etc.), the system will start to slow down as if there's some sort of resource leak (i.e., handles or memory), eventually resulting in a catastrophic power-cycle-needed crash. (That is, FG crashes, but even after that, the machine acts screwy until it is rebooted, even with FG no longer running.)

While this obviously needs to be resolved, I'd like to suggest that FG handle crashes better. When FG saves a campaign, it needs to do two things: one, make a backup copy of (or rename) the old db.xml and campaignregistry.lua files before saving out the most recent data, and two, flush the buffers (or, better yet, close the files) on the most recent data so that we can manually copy those files if needed.

Sometimes the actual crash happens when FG is closing, which results in the corruption of those data files. I've lost hours worth of work on multiple occasions due to this, as well as combat tracker entries from the middle of heated combat. Shouldn't be that hard to implement, either, since it's just file manipulation - probably much easier than tracking down the crash bug itself ;)

Dachannien
June 19th, 2007, 01:45
I'd just like to say that we just had this problem occur a few minutes ago, resulting in all of the level-up changes my players made being erased, and this is perhaps the third or fourth time we've had a server crash cause a data loss problem like this. (I've even had it destroy my installation of Thunderbird because of it using too many handles or something while Thunderbird was open, which is really really bad.)

You really, really, really need to make the program prepare for crashes better. Sorry to sound angry, but I kinda am right now :/