WOLF@BBNG (Jerry Wolf) (03/04/86)
I wonder if anyone else out there, among the select few using the VAXstation VS100, have observed a problem with the ACP going into an infinite loop, which, since the ACP runs at a higher priority than users, grabs almost the entire CPU? It appears to be doing no i/o or page faulting, just sits there. If you have observed this problem, do you have any insights or information on it? (We're running VMS 4.1 with Release 1.1 of the VSTA software.) We've seen this sort of thing both deterministically and apparently randomly. We've observed it only inside an application that uses several pasteboards, some with many virtual displays pasted on them. The deterministic thing happened (8/85) when we were pasting several displays on a pasteboard. We appealed to DEC (not Colorado, but some place in Atlanta? I think, that is (was?) for VAXstation problems, eventually sending them the whole program package, which they were able to use to recreate the problem. They came up with no insight on the problem, but observed that the problem didn't occur if we pasted the displays in top-to-bottom order. That was the extent of their help, not truly satisfying in its comprehensiveness. The other observances don't seem to be repeatable, but simply happen sometime in the course of running this interactive program with many pastebaords/displays/menus, etc. We've only observed it a few times, and it seems to be when the program is removing displays or pasteboards from the screen. I don't know that the causes are related, only that the symptom (ACP looping forever) is similar. ANyone else?