OpenEuphoria

internet code

• Posted by gertie at ad-tek.net Jun 03, 2001
• 360 views

Hey all,

Since the list is quiet at the moment, at least in my mailbox, i thought i'd
write a
novelette about my current internet programming results. (Contrary to popular
belief, "-
ette" means small, "-ess" means female.)

I ran into a new puter trouble a month ago, and i couldn't find the reason. It
seemed to
go into a "suspend" mode, like powersavings, but it stopped the clock cold too.
The
screen might or might not have gone blank. If i moved the mouse, the screen
would
pop back up,, in the last state it was when it blanked, but nothing on it would
be
current in time, for instance, it would show me still online, when in fact the
clock had
stopped 10 minutes after i went to bed, and *nothing* had occurred since! It
would take
as long as two minutes before the puter realised it wasn't online, notify the
internet
apps, and ask me if i wanted to reconnect. Occasionally the screen would freeze,
and
i couldn't mouse or get a ctrl-alt-del window,,, or ctrl-alt-del restart the
puter. This was
Not Good.

My first consideration was that i may have been trojaned, since this was a new 
occurance and i had changed no OS settings, and something hooked into the puter 
and was using the cpu at the lowest ring state and highest priority,,, but i
really was
offline, the firewall showed nothing on the highest alert settings or in logs,
and puter
scans showed nothing. I even checked the open files and verified what apps
opened
them, what other apps had been spawned, and what dll's they were linked to. I
also
checked the timestamp on some files, and compared that to the times some apps
had
been running. Nothing out of the ordinary showed up. I pulled the ethernet card,
and
unloaded all lan programs from the OS.

I was getting nowhere.

So after a couple weeks of this, i needed a rest, and pretty much shut down most
of
the mirc and Eu code. Strange.... the problem went away. So i began suspecting 
everything i had shut down: the http proxy, the Eu code, the mirc code, Pegasus,
the
new isp, the arrangement of the desktop, the harddrives,, nothing was beyond 
suspicion. Over the next week, i brought back everything one at a time, by
itself. I tried
everything in different configurations of the puter, lightly loaded, and with
multiple
instances of everything. I tried each suspect app with 80% puter resources
available,
and with 10% resources available. I tried each with 95% idle cpu up to 100%
loaded
cpu. I tried with heavy net traffic, and light net traffic, and not online at
all. I tried with
nothing much in memory (128megs SDRAM), and with everything loaded, including 
100 megabytes of text files and 20 open IE sessions.

Why was i doing this? Because i value reliability. If it's not there when i need
it, then i
don't need it. <rant_mode="on"> If the tool isn't there, then i can't say i can
use it.
Rather like powersaving settings in the OS, if i have the puter on, it better be
doing
what i told it to do,, and if i am not at the screen, by golly, i know where the
power
switch is. If i have code running, i don't want the OS kicking the harddrives
out from
under it. </rant>

Anyhow, i think i have found the problem. At least, i am back online with no
problems
now.

I had tried all the internet connection code for windoze in the archives, one at
a time,
and often at the same time. A lot of mirc code was online, and a lot of
EInetLib_full.ew
or EInetLib.ew code. A small amount of tcp4u code was running, and i had one 
winsock.e code running. The winsock.e was the first app i had stopped using in
my
efforts to find the problem. The tcp4u was the last internet code i had tried. I
suspected
the winsock.e because it *seemed* to be a lower level access to the OS, and
therefore
the most likely to not have safeguards,, and Jesus didn't seem to be supporting
it
anymore. The problem didn't go away when i shut down the tcp4u code. The 
"suspend" problem occured with EInetLib_full.ew. When the puter is in use
intensively,
it seems to *interact* with every other net application, IE5.x, the proxy,
email, mirc,
everything. By itself, one application, it seems to be fine. But it doesn't
stand up to
24hr a day, 7day/week industrial duty use here (and i have been using it only
for http
access!). 

Well, we have been having a spate of active weather here, the last couple weeks
it's
unusual to not have hail and mesocyclones on radar in every 24hr day, so i have
been
on edge and not sleeping much. Right now, radar shows hail here. I decided to
explore
tcp4u some more, to exercize it and see if it would break like EInetLib_full.ew.
Other
than the two bugs i posted to the list, the parts of tcp4u i have tried are
working, but i
haven't used it all yet. One nite, i got the irc client on line, one nite i made
it recieve
email, and last nite it sent email. All along it was web mining using http.
Right now,
there are 8 instances of Eu code using tcp4u running (and the mirc code and
Textpad,
of course, and multiple IE, Pegasus, etc etc), and the cpu is only 10% loaded,
and i
have had no more "suspend" problems.

Your mileage may vary. Has it? How are you using Eu to connect online? Under
what
circumstances?

Kat,
listening.