[comp.windows.x] Crashing xterm and twm with HP menu widgets on Domain/IX

lai@software.ORG (Kwo-Long Lai) (10/13/88)

Recently, I've been struggling with a strange problem:

A testing client built on Domain/IX(9.7) creating about 100 HP menubuttons (two level of menus system)talking to Xapollo crashes xterm, twm and xclock. 

Symptom:

80% of the time client ran fine; 15% of the time server refused client's
request and responed with all kinds of X protocol error messages(e.g IDChoice,
Window, Match, Value or Xlib: sequence lost in reply type...); 2% of the time
the client would hang forever; and 3% of the time  would crash xterm,
and/or twm and/or ....,  which was the worst case.   When this
happened, it hang tcp/ip server.  Switching  back to DM to restart tcp/ip would
bring back X with xterm, twm runing fine, but the testing client would get
a connection broken message.  As a result, I was forced to reboot the system. 
(The client never got a SEGV;  On DM, I got -  xterm: IO error)  


I have also tried to run xterm -D with a lot of fprintfs and catching most 
of the signals, or using debug of SR9.7 (it even killed debug once; program 
always exited when using dbx of SR9.7 under X), but nothing 
helped and xterm.debug.log does not keep many information which 
were useful to resolve this problem.

Environment:

I am runing X11R2, Domain/IX(9.7) and the latest HP public domain Widget set
on DN3000 and 590.   Has anyone ever run into such situation?  Any hints or
answers would be highly appreciated.

Note: The same client built on Sun 3 runing SunOS 3.4 talking to Xsun ran
fine without any crashes.  Talking to Xapollo might get the connection
broken message if I tried to run the same client more than 3 in the background.
(there were always 2 clients runing fine.)
However, using Apollo client talking to Xsun would get X protocol errors 
as discussed in the above(15% of the time) or XIO: error, but it never 
crashed twm/xterm.

SunOS3.4 is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Domain/IX is a registered trademark of Apollo Computer Inc.
The X Window System is a trademark of MIT.



Kwo-Long Lai
Software Productivity Consortium
1880 Campus Commons Drive, North
Reston, VA 22091
(703) 391-1835

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