FEFLOW Freezing Problem

Hello All:

There was an original thread by scubohuntr which explained the freezing problem as below:

[i]FEFLOW 6.1 is locking up on me quite frequently. Almost every time I try to right click on a chart (apparently the only way to export temporal data) and most of the time when I try to edit observation points, the program freezes. Usually if I hit ctrl-alt-del and cancel the reboot it unfreezes it, until I try to do the same thing again. It's that "almost" that makes this really frustrating. It works often enough to maintain hope, but I am spending a LOT of my time trying to unlock frozen software. I have reinstalled FEFLOW, and I have tried several different machines to no avail. When it is locked up, the mouse moves and obviously the keyboard remains active, since ctrl-alt-del still functions, but I can't click on anything, and alt-tab will bring up the dialog but won't switch between active programs. I haven't seen the problem doing anything else yet, but right clicking charts or editing obs points will lock it up most of the time. Anyone have any suggestions?[/i]

I am having the same problem. Limiting the size of the output does not solve it. It is quite random. I haven't seen a reply to this from administrative team. Any suggestions?

Ranjeet

Hello Ranjeet,

The issue is related to the mouse click (capture), it may also happen when clicking polygonal selections. This capture event needs to interact with the operating system via the graphics' driver. Since this operation is taking place outside FEFLOW, it is not traceable for our developers in debug mode.

I found a workaround some time ago: Closing all active programs in the windows task bar (basically every program which is also addressing graphical features, such as browsers, mail programs...) helps. Uninstalling FEFLOW, changing the graphics driver or deactivating the hardware acceleration did not help in my case. My system specs are: Core I5 Windows 7 64 bit with 8 GB RAM and Intel HD 3000 graphics.

In the meantime our developers are looking for a solution, but since this bug is a tough one, it may take a while. Thanks for your understanding,

Bastian

Hi Bastian,

Thanks for looking into this. I contacted Sonia at the Canada DHI office and in turn she forwarded the issue to Bjorn.

I have in the meantime found a work-around. The problem seems to occur when we exit FEFLOW and it continues to run in the background (as indicated by windows task manager/processes). This happens all the time with FEFLOW 6.0 and higher. So, I have been making sure that I end process every time I exit FEFLOW. This seems to have worked so far. Let me know if you see a reason why FEFLOW continues to run in background.

Cheers,
Ranjeet

Hi Ranjeet,

When FEFLOW continues to show up as process in the task manager after closing, this indicates that a thread initialized by FEFLOW (f.e. when clicking on a diagram, or the mouse-capture by the polygonal selection) got stuck. So even when the main program is closed, this threads still exists and shows up under processes. Killing this process is therefore ok, however, our support is going to have a more detailed look into this issue here and see if we can reproduce it.

Best regards,

Bastian

Hi Bastian:

The freezing problem is back with installation of 6.2. I am not sure why this will happen again. The work around I had figured out last time does not seem to work anymore. However, FEFLOW starts to respond randomly and freezes randomly during same runs.

Ranjeet

That's quite unfortunate. Is there anyone else experiencing the same?

I know that my group previously had issues with an early version of FEFLOW 6.1 which prevented our remote desktop sessions from refreshing the display. Whenever we right-clicked on a chart it would stop refreshing, until we minimized then maximized it. It would instantly break again if we right-clicked on a chart. It was either fixed by a FEFLOW 6.1 patch or by installing the latest updates to RDP sessions for Windows, which we did at the same time. Ever since then, I don't think we've had issues with either 6.1 or 6.2. Hope that helps? This definitely sounds like a similar problem to what I've encountered in the past.

Adam