FreeRange Feedback

[Jarno]

I now have the beginning of the symptoms leading up to my previous problem (see http://freerange.no-ip.info/bb/viewtopic.php?t=139) yet again:

1. I had quite a backlog of messages.
2. Updating/downloading it took a very long time.
3. FreeNews frooze during updating at about 53%.
4. I used the Stop menu option you have during update.
5. FreeNews would not react afterwards, so I stopped the app.
6. After restarting FreeNews, I had 659 new articles.
7. When trying to read this, I got numerous InvalidIndexExceptions. (Nearly anything I tried to read bombed on me.)
8. I thought "Here we go again...".
9. I used "Delete all articles in all feeds".
10. Then I used "Update again", hoping for a clean article list afterwards.
11. This update was very quick: now I have new 4 articles.
12. Top of screen says "[] Today [] 659 of 4" (!)
13. I don't dare to use FreeNews any more in this state.

So, I will be using the testing version again that wipes all data on startup and hope the problem will be gone, but I'm afraid it won't be.

David, I have a number of questions:

- Do you know of anything that might cause Update to freeze?
- Is "Update" (including using "Stop" while its busy/frozen) transactional?
- If it's not, could the above scenario explain my corrupt data store?

If you need more specific help or information from me in looking into this I'll be willing to help in any way. I'll wait with running the test version until I hear from you. Perhaps some debug build could shed light on the current state of the data store on my phone right now?

[Jarno]

Could this be related to the problems described (and fixed?) in earlier version in http://freerange.no-ip.info/bb/viewtopic.php?t=60...?

[Jarno]

Changes to a test version of 1.0.6 seem to improve stability regarding this problem at least so far. Also, in a future version FreeNews might detect the beginning of corruption and notify the user and/or automatically perform a reset. Hopefully this will have solved this problem, or at least the most dramatic negative effects of its symptoms.

[nodogrules]

I too have been having this problem since the upgrade, although not nearly as severe.

I am finding that approximately 20-30% of the time I do an update, it ends up freezing during the update process (varying percent complete, varying rss feeds it fails on). This is happening despite my deleting all feeds religiously between updates.

Subsequent updates only pull a minimal number of feeds, almost like the first update reset some sort of switch for all feeds that should have been downloaded during the failed update but never made it. Subsequent updates appear to ignore those updates that never made it during the failed update.

Eventually, as updated rss feeds become available, my rss list trickles back to normal, but it appears that I lose the ones that never made it across during the failed update.

I'm running a 7100g bb from cingular.

I have tried uninstalling/battery removal reset/reinstalling/battery removal reset, but that doesn't seem to prevent the problem from recurring.

I have restricted the feed size to 512, and limited number of feeds to 10. I have also reduced the number of feeds I receive, hoping that would alleviate the problem, but all to no avail so far.

As with the other user, this problem never occurred until the latest update (i'm currently at v1.0.6 (Midp 2.0) (bb).

Are there any recommendations you can make that may help me in preventing this problem?

Thanks.

[Jarno]

I've had the problem on my Siemens S65 mobile phone ever since I start using FreeNews (1.0.3 I think). It seems that error/exception handling is not as robust as it could or should be in all eventualities. Of course, this is very difficult in mobile application on a score of different hardware platforms as all of these platforms will probably do something slightly different.

It seemed to me that the update process was not atomic (=running as one transaction). This should have at least partially changed now with the special test version of 1.0.6 I'm running now. So far, have not had update freezing on me, so I'm still not sure.

I did have signs of beginning corruption again: after a "delete all read articles for all feeds" one read item was left in the list where I would have expected none. After the update following that I found that using "Next" on the last item gave me an invalid index exception.

After that I did an immediate restore (=clear all local data), which is what I always do after seeing any signs of corruption.

Luckily it does seem to occur less often with the latest changes made by David. Let's hope it lasts, and the 1.0.7 will react to signs of corruption (like showing a higher unread article count than total article count, or when invalid index exceptions occurs) with either a forced restore or at least a warning message to the user.

[Jarno]

Again, I've used FreeNews for some time without any bigger problems than an occasional previously deleted item reappearing as a read item after I have read all my articles and doing a "Delete all read articles from all feeds".

This weekend however, I started getting a startup problem again that prevents me from using FreeNews...

When I start it, all I get is a error messagebox (caption = "Error" and the icon shown is a red diagonal cross) with the following message: "Index corrupted: 68". So this is not an uncaught exception (that's a different looking messagebox), but some problem that is apparently being detected by FreeNews 1.0.6.

Unfortunately, the application seems to do nothing else than detect the problem and show the messagebox, as afterwards the application does only the following: 1) show a white screen, 2) show a moving barberpole busy indicator at the bottom of the screen and 3) react to the * fullscreen key (switching the system top and bottom bars from my phone on/off, both being empty). Nothing else, seemingly indefinately. Tried for over an hour.

I have contacted David and hope this problem can be resolved...