bergman@m2c.m2c.org (Michael Bergman) (03/02/90)
(This is a modification of an article I posted and then cancelled. My
apologies if it appears in both forms; I don't know how well "cancel"
works, never having tried it before)
I used to have a problem with 18.51 (I think) freezing up on me
periodically (under ultrix on a Vax3600). And sometimes quitting with
no saving throw, with the error message:
Xlib: sequence lost (0x20000 > 0x12284) in reply type 0x0!
or something similar. I don't remember if the two problems are
related or not, but I haven't seen the freezing problem for a long
time. The other one just came back to haunt me again. Read on...
I posted to this group, and got a couple of useful replies, one of
which said that the problem would be fixed with UWS2.2, and one of
which offered a patch to x11term.c, causing it to look something like
this (ignore the comment bars)
/* static int server_ping_timer; */
BLOCK_INPUT_DECLARE ();
/* if (server_ping_timer > 0) */
/* server_ping_timer--; */
/* else */
/* { */
/* server_ping_timer = 100; */
/* Yes, this is really what I mean -- Check to see if we've
* lost our connection */
BLOCK_INPUT ();
XSetErrorHandler(0);
XSetIOErrorHandler(0);
...and so on...
/* } */
After instituting this change, in 18.54 (as long as I was recompiling
I upgraded), I no longer had freeze-ups or sudden death syndrome, but
would periodically drop a character, apparently sending some sort of
garbage instead. The result would be as if two characters had been
dropped. Now that we have UWS2.2, I have recompiled without the
change (hence the comment bars) and the problem is better -- but not
completely gone. At least the freezing up hasn't returned. However,
the sudden loss of emacs, with files unsaved, has just returned. I
have only dropped characters once since recompiling (in about 2 hours
of use) as compared to once every 15 minutes or so before, so there's
a definite improvement -- but meanwhile I was wondering if there was
any insight any of you could offer on this problem. Since I wrote the
previous sentence, I have had one "death" with the error message given
above. Help!
--
--mike bergman
Massachusetts Microelectronics Center
75 North Drive, Westborough, MA 01581, USA +1 (508) 870-0312
UUCP: (...harvard)!m2c!bergman INTERNET: bergman@m2c.org