From: Rebecca and Rowland (rebecca@ASTRID.U-NET.COM)
Date: 15 Oct 98, 08:34 EST
From: Rebecca and Rowland <rebecca@ASTRID.U-NET.COM> Subject: Re: "Rude" behavior by developers [snip] >For a programmer (I am speaking in general) to be able to fix a particular >problem, he absolutely needs to reproduce it on his machine. (Generally >speaking, that is. There are, of course, exceptions.) Yes, I do understand this. The thing is that the crashing behaviour doesn't appear to be consistent or easily reproducable, and other messages to the Alpha-D list have suggested that there's no point in me trying to investigate further because of the mechanism that's likely to cause the problem. [snip] >Yes, you reported you've experienced some such problems, and another person >supported your experience by commenting that he has observed Alpha is more >stable when tempMem is OFF. But the problem itself has not _yet_ been >made explicit enough. I'm not sure what else I could do; without the sort of detailed knowledge Alpha developers have, is it really possible for me to provide any information other than `it crashed again when I was doing X' on an irregular basis? >So, Rowland, there are several ways: You could just give up right now and >revert back to 6.52. You are perfectly entitled to do so. Or, you could >keep being patient and continue exploring Alpha's memory management >(with a non-programmer's eye, of course) The thing is that I *can't* explore Alpha's memory management: it's like asking a blind man to paint you a picture. All I can possibly do is keep reporting times when Alpha has crashed on me, which won't do anyone any good that I can think of. > with a hope that someday you could >stumble upon a more reproducible way of crashing Alpha's tempMem. This strikes me as silly: I'd have to resign myself to losing data on a regular basis without there being any real hope of finding a more reproducible way of crashing Alpha. [snip] I personally think that the best line to take is this: Alpha's memory management is apparently known to be `not very good', and (I gather) it's being looked at. Given that the problems I've been having are intermittent and erratic, I suspect that it's best to just wait until a version of Alpha with better memory management comes out, and see if the problems have gone away - as I suspect will be the case. Thanks for the thoughts Rowland.