[ack_hh]

things are getting worse
version 3.9.6 crashed with an IPF while I was sitting
at a table but doing nothing (hand was finished, movie update was OK)

[fred]

Hmmm - this is the first crash report we have had and I have received several e-mails suggesting that the problems were gone (these e-mails game from people who used to crash frequently).

Can you please try deleting this file:

c:\bridge base online\db

and try again. Let me know what happens. It is quite possible that this file became corrupted as a result of your experiments with 3.9.4 and 3.9.5.

Thanks,

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[luke warm]

kibbing with 3.96 and no probs at all.. but then i haven't had any with either of the other (unless bbo caused my keyboard to quit on me, but somehow i doubt that heheh)...

[MickyB]

I'd had no problems before this version, but while kibitzing 3.96 crashed - when I switched user I found that BBO wasn't responding and the window went white, then it came up with an IE error. Have deleted db now.

[rona_]

3.9.6 working great for me so far, but I've upgraded straight from 3.9.3. on this computer.

[spwdo]

Hi,


have done update from 3.9.5, no probs sofar



Marc

[sceptic]

I was sat at a tbale for just under an hour and I started to get white pages that as soon as a card was played it displayed the table and the table appeared to show a bit like when u=you use paint function in microsoft revealing the table as the card slowly travelled to the centre of the table

[fred]

One thing you might want to try sceptic is either speedy up or turning off the card animation. You can do this by logging in and clicking the Options button on the toolbar (this button looks like a gear).

A window will appear. In the top right corner of this window you will see controls that can be used to changed the way the card animation works.

If you wouldn't mind trying this (ideally turning it off completely) and letting me know if you see the white screen effect again I would appreciate it.

I am quite sure this is not a 3.9.6 issue. The white screen thing has been around for a while and it is at least partly a function of how many people are logged into BBO.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[DrTodd13]

Yes, the white screen issue is not a new one. I run XP home edition and I think I started getting the white screens with version 3.9.4 onwards. I don't have card animations turned on either. I haven't noticed any pattern that might indicate why they are happening.

I haven't experienced any crashes either in any of the last 3 versions.

Todd

[skyhawk]

Fred,

Played for 20 minutes today immediately after updating to 3.9.6. Four white screens in 20 minutes -- a record, as it is usually once or twice in a 2 hr session.

Between 4800 and 4980 logged in while playing today. Others at the table do not experience white screen at the same time -- in fact, no one of about 7 players queried today have ever seen the white screen. (Guess I am just lucky? )

1 4:18 pm (EST) Less than 5 minutes after logging on. TABLE SCREEN WHITE, but the movie/scorecard which I was viewing at the time REMAINED VISIBLE.

2 4:30 sitting at new table with 3 different players. Card play was delayed immediately after return. White for about 3 seconds, about 2 seconds for card to play after selected.

3 4:36 White for about 4-5 seconds. This too, is different as in the past about 2 seconds was normal.

4 4:38 Again white screen.

In general, the site was slightly slow, with minor pauses after clicking card. Typing text sometimes was delayed slightly also. 90 days ago it was rare to have any delay while playing, either in chat or playing cards.

As an aside, I am running on Comcast cable and although you are working to "improve" log-on time, mine seems to deteriorate. No problem -- just a comment. In the past it was taking less than a second to load complete. Now it is more than twice that, and incremental instead of instant, but not objectionable. It could be that your site has stretched log-on time, and meantime you are shortening it, and I am seeing a net increase.

[fred]

First some good news:

A couple of you reported crashes while kibitzing even with 3.9.6 (these are the only crash reports we have had with this version).

What is good is that we now believe these crashes are not client-based. There is a bug involving the way the server tells the client about what happens after a cut is made in a survivor tournament. This results in a crash for post 3.9.3 clients that are sitting or kibitzing at a table.

In all likelyhood Uday will be able to fix this by tonight so hopefully there will be no more crashes - all indications are that the problems that were causing 3.9.4 and 3.9.5 to crash are indeed fixed.

About skyhawk's report of slower logins:

There are several factors which effect login speed. The most important of these is the quality of your Internet connection. The main factor that we are able to control is the amount of data that BBO has to send the client when a login request is made. The more data we have to send down, the longer it takes to login.

Hopefully you will take my word for this: we have dramatically reduced the amount of data that BBO sends down upon login and this is certain to have a major impact upon your average login time.

Still, the busier BBO gets, the more data we have to send down so you can expect logins with 2000 users online to be faster than those when there are 5000 people online (but regardless of how many people are online when you login, your logins times will be faster than they would have been with the 3.9.3 client).

As I said above, however, there are other factors in play here. If your ISP is having a bad day, for example, you can expect login times to increase. You may notice that sometimes things like checking mail take longer on some days than others. The same principle applies.

About white screens:

Looks like this is going to become our number 1 priority now that the problems in 3.9.6 appear to be solved. First of all, we have good reason to believe that this problem is not dependent on the version of BBO that you are running. If it seems worse with the new test version than it did with earlier versions, it is almost certainly because BBO has been busier since in the last few days than it ever has been before.

The BBO program has a single function that is responsible for drawing the entire screen. There are only 2 logical reasons why the white screen effect could occur:

Either:

1) This function is not working properly under some circumstances

or

2) This function is not being called frequently enough

I am willing to bet that 2 is the case (mostly because the function in question contains tests to make sure that 1 doesn't happen - if one of these tests failed you would get an error message and the BBO program would exit).

The following may not make sense to those of you who lack technical knowledge about the basics of how Windows programs work, but I think there are enough people who read forums who have strong technical skills that it is worthwhile for me to explain my thinking so far. Maybe one of you will have an idea...

Your computer's operating system (ie whatever version of Windows you are running) decides when it is a good time to repaint the BBO screen. In theory this should always happen within a tiny fraction of a second of when the BBO program tells Windows "please repaint my screen whenever convenient". The BBO program sends Windows such a message whenever you do something like move your mouse over a player name, play a card, join a table...

I believe that the white screen effect is happening because instead of a tiny fraction of a second, "when convenient" sometimes takes several seconds. This would happen if Windows decided that it had more important things to do, but it takes a lot of "more important things" to overwhelm your typical modern PC's resources for several seconds. If this was happening only to people running Windows 95 on old PCs it would be more understandable, but it seems that this problem also happens to some people running new PCs under XP.

Unfortunately it never seems to happen to me or Uday which makes it very hard for us to track down and fix...

We know for sure that the more people who are on BBO, the more frequent the white screen problem comes up. This suggests that BBO itself is at least partly to blame for your computer being overwhelmed with things to do and not having any time left over to repaint the screen.

However, if it was only BBO's fault then white screen problem would be happening to everyone (or at least to a lot more people than who are seeing it happen now). The fact that only a small % of our users experience this problem suggest that something about they way their PCs are configured, other software running on their PCs, or the nature of their Internet connection plays a role in determining who will see a white screen and when they will see it.

Without getting highly technical, this is about all we know right now, but every report that we get about this problem has the potential to help us figure out exactly why this problem is happening. Once we know the cause, it is almost certain we will be able to do something about it.

Hope this post as given someone out there the clue we need to solve this problem. Keep those posts coming!

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[DrTodd13]

Hi Fred,

Do you know what OS the white screen problem is appearing on. All the people that I saw say they had the problem were using XP. Maybe that could help track the problem down. Also, the weird thing about the white screen is that it doesn't just white-out the BBO frame, it whites out the entire desktop (at least for me). Also, during a white-out, some other things seem to be non-responsive but that is hard to tell since the white screen doesn't last very long. I've done my share of windows programming and this problem is different from the "application is busy and can't redraw its window" problem. If BBO was on top and it stopped refreshing then you wouldn't notice anything except that nothing in the BBO window would change. If the window isn't refreshing and you drag another window over it then you get that effect where the contents of the window that were dragged continue to appear in the BBO window. This white screen problem seems to me different from either of these symptoms. I've never seen anything like this issue with any other application.

Todd

[ack_hh]

I still get IPFs from time to time.
It seems these crashes always happen when i'm sitting
at a table, a hand is finished, and opps are using table chat then -
but these conditions are hard to track or reproduce.

BTW, the "white screen" thing has never occured here.

[fred]

I started to hear about the white screen problem for the first time around May I think. At that time it seemed that the few people who were seeing it (or at least the few that were telling me about it) were running Windows 98 (presumably on old PCs).

Nowadays I hear about it from people will all varieties of Windows.

Your post is the first I have heard about the entire desktop turning white, but I susepect that most of our users still run at either 800x600 or 1024x768 with BBO as a full screen application. These people would not have noticed it if the problem was happening outside of BBO's main window. The "normal" symptoms seems to be that the BBO title bar and toolbar can still be seen (can you see these when you see the white screen condition) but that everything in between is white.

I agree that the state that you describe with the desktop turning white is highly unusual - I have never seen anything like this either.

Thanks for your post.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[42]

Hi,

I run windows XP homeedition and updated to version 3.9.6. I played a tourney, chatted, kibized, logged in and off, invisible or not, and I had NO problems, everything was very fine

Caren

[fred]

A realiable tester reports that he gets the white screen (sometimes) when the following 3 conditions exist:

1) BBO is busy
2) He is looking at the Main Bridge Club list
3) He moves his mouse over a player's name or clicks on an empty seat

Has anyone else noticed a correlation between mouse movement/clicking and the white screen? In other words, do you ever see the white screen effect if you are just sitting there and not moving your mouse?

If you are one of the people who sees the white screen and you are bored one day, can you try an experiment of leaving BBO with the Main Bridge Club list showing (or kibitzing at a table) with the mouse pointer outside of the BBO window? Does the white screen effect ever happen under these conditions (suggest you wait until we have 4000+ people online to try this).

Any of the programmers out there know anything about the SetCapture and ReleaseCapture Windows API calls (specifically how not being careful with such calls might result in messing up the application or Windows in general)?

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[paulg]

Playing in a tourney yesterday, for the first time I had the experience where the audio ping alerting me to bid arrived 2-3 seconds before the screen displayed RHO's bid and my bidding box.

Running 3.9.6 at a busy time (~4500 users) on a modern laptop w/XP.

paul

[sceptic]

I tried a few different settings and speeds as you suggested fred, but I have it back the same as yesterday now (animate cards ticked and fast speed) and I have had one white screen today, I played 27 hands in a row and it was fine. and I believe over 3000 people on at that time at least.

the white screen covered the entire chat and playing area, it did not affect the edges of BBO screen on my PC nor the tool bar at the bottom, it dissappeared straight away and did not come back fragmented following a played card or anything like that (no idea if that makes sense to you or not)

also I have only ever seen it when I am sat playing at a table

[DrTodd13]

I know that most of the time I've seen the white screen that I was at a table playing and it was around the time that it was my turn to click on a card. As far as I can remember, I've never gotten the white screen at the first screen or at the main bridge club tables screen. Nor have I ever gotten the white screen while kibitzing.

Todd

[fred]

We think we are finally on to a good lead with the white screen problem. Thanks to everyone who has posted here and sent us e-mail on this subject. The information you have provided has been very helpful.

No promises yet, but I hope that we will have a new beta version by the start of next week for which white screens will not be an issue.

Todd, do you (or any of the other programmers out there who sees the white screens) have a copy of Microsoft's Visual Studio?

If yes, you could really help us out by running a tool that comes with this package called Spy++ and letting us know what it reports during white screen episodes. If anyone out there thinks they can help in this regard, please post here or send me an e-mail (fred@bridgebase.com).

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com