Re: LYNX-DEV Bug in Lynx 2.6 under IRIX with large tables

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

Ok, let me apologize in advance for the cut and paste nature of this
message, but I didn't want to send out 8 million messages. :)

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Mike Brudenell wrote:

>       lynx http://www.york.ac.uk/ServerSupport/UsageStats/
...
> I applied the patches, recompiled everything, and Lynx still crashes on
> this page.  The worst thing is that if it is not being run under the
> control of the debugger it ends up in an infinite CPU gobbling loop that
> can be broken out of (except by logging in again and "kill -9"-ing it).
> 
> Is there anything else I can try?  (Or do to provide people with more
> information about the problem?)

Hi Mike, one thing you can do that would be of immense help in determining
the exact cause of the crash would be to do a 'lynx -trace' and capture
the output of the trace to a file and post it.  I would suggest using sh
since it allows you to redirect stdout and type the following:

$ lynx -trace http://whatever 2> trace.log

Or, you could just type 'lynx 2> trace.log' and then press Ctrl-T while in
Lynx just before using 'g'oto and entering the URL.  This second method
would skip all of the startup stuff that Lynx does in the log.  Then, send
us the file trace.log...

See below for my comments on the possible causes, patches, etc...

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Scott McGee (Personal) wrote:

> I tried with my plain 2.6 (solaris2-slang) and it worked fine untill I
> started moving down the page, then, when it should have shown the next
> page, it crashed.  It looks like there are a LOT of links, maybe too
> many. That is, as I recall, one of the things fixed in the patch. right? 

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Roger Hill wrote:

> Ok, after I saw Scott's post, I checked out the page again. It has 809
> links! But I can page up and down ok.
> 
> Mike: try hard coding MAXLINKS in userdefs.h to say 850 and see if that
> fixes it.  There was a patch for adjusting the number of links
> dynamically, but I do not know if it works for IRIX.

Well, "fixed" is a subjective term in this case.  The actual problem
before was more than MAXLINKS appearing on the screen at the same time. 
The page could have 1000 links, but as long as no more than 256 (the
default MAXLINKS value) were on the screen at one time, you would be ok.
Fote fudged on the "fix" and made it ignore anything past MAXLINKS.  As a
result, on HP-UX the last 6-7 links on each page are not accessible, but
it doesn't crash.  I'm not sure if the dynamic allocation patch has been
kept up or if it will work with the current composite or not...

On Mon, 2 Dec 1996, Audin Malmin wrote:

> This is the behavior I got when I tried it using my plain 2.6 + character
> Styles on Ultrix...  The first page displays fine, but hitting PG-Down causes
> it to crash...
>  
>  Actually, Pg-down causes it to display it's little crash message, then it
> displays about half of the screen, and then displays the crash message 
> again...
> 
> I suspect that's an Ncurses strangeness, though....

I'm not sure if it's related to ncurses.  I haven't had a chance to try it
on my Linux box, so I'm not sure how it performs over there or exactly
what's crashing...  We'll let Mike send us a trace log and see if we can
figure it out from there...

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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