[12036] in Athena Bugs
decmips 7.6G: frame
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (alexp@MIT.EDU)
Wed May 11 16:53:41 1994
From: alexp@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 11 May 94 16:48:32 EDT
To: occhi@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU
>On different DEC-5000s, this ''heavy load'' makes the following:
>1) Deteriorated performance of the workstation (I know, in a sense it's my fault)
>2) Colors become messy: the frame bars get a funny fuchsia instead of the usual
> black, and the matlab graphs in the matlab graphics windows loose many lines
> when the mouse pointer doesn't point in that window (this happens on the
> SPARCclassic, too)
>3) Sometimes the system gets stuck while attempting to import a graphic *.eps
> file: the monitor area in which the imported graphic is supposed to go tends
> to expand in other areas, and the system simply gets stuck on it. No way to
> use any program anymore, and it ususally reboots after a while. A couple of
> times the reboot failed, and I had to reboot it by the keyboard command.
>I should stress that this happens in heavy duty conditions on the DEC 5000, but
>it happened only once on the SPARCclassic, on which I am currently working.
Antonio,
On your problems:
1) Can't help there.
2) Colors get messed up if your applications are using a lot of colors. There
is usually not much that can be done other than closing down some of the
applications; other than not looking nice, it shouldn't affect how your
applications run. The colors should return to normal when you put the mouse
focus back inside the window.
3) We have seen a similar problem with DECstations with imported xwd images;
this may be due to the same cause. I'm not sure if it is due to loading
though. The xwd problem happened whether load was heavy or not; it also did
not happen every time- about 1 out of 3 tries; do you see the same behavior?
If it is the same problem, I'm afraid that Frame will not help fix it, since
they said that they were not able to reproduce the problem; they are also
dropping FrameMaker on DECstations and are gradually desupporting that
platform. If you could send me a sample of a file that causes the problem,
with an estimate of how often it happens (if not every time), I can try to
reproduce it. You can copy it to my Public folder:
/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/a/l/alexp/Public
Your best bet is to work on Suns; we have not seen any problem on that
platform and if you saw it only once it probably is very rare there. I would
report the Sun problem to Frame if it can be reproduced but if it can't
I doubt there is much I can do. Take care.
Alex Prengel, Jr.
Academic Computing Services
Software Acquisition Coordinator
