FEFLOW crashing or power problems?

Has anyone ever had FEFLOW crash and shut itself down, ie completely exit?  I've been running a model for nearly 9 days and it has stopped/crashed twice.  But I don't get any message in the log window indicating a problem.  After it crashes, FEFLOW is exited and I have to open it back up.  I'm trying to figure out whether this is actually a problem with FEFLOW or maybe I'm getting power surges that restarts the computer?  Essentially, I need to find out if this kind of thing has happened to anyone else before the IT guys will buy a UPS for this computer.
Thanks.

I've been having the same problem on long runs. FEFLOW stops and exits without warning or error messages. It is sporadic, and impossible to reproduce. It has happend to me overnight, but also during the day.

It does not seem to be a power spike affecting my computer as other applications I have open are still running fine. Furthermore, previous experience demonstrates that power spikes result in the PC shutting down, not automatically restarting and reopening applications running previously.

We though it might be MS or Norton automatic updates. Investigation proved otherwise.

It is possibly a power spike on the server (were the license resides) but probably not for the same reasons above. My IT guy does not report anything unusual with the server coinciding with the times it shuts down.

My guess is that it is FEFLOW, and not a power interruption issue. It is an inconvience, but not a disaster.

Kelly & Dwaine,

indeed it is probably FEFLOW causing that problem. Or - strictly speaking - not FEFLOW, but the X server XVision we currently provide with FEFLOW. XVision is needed to create the graphical windows for FEFLOW. Generally a crash of FEFLOW is caused by XVision if no Windows alert box appears.

There are two possible solutions:
- Close all diagram Windows in FEFLOW before starting a simulation run. A crash seems to be much more likely if you run simulations with high numbers of curves (observation points, wells, etc.) and many time steps due to the drawing of the diagrams.
- Alternatively you can use another X server, e.g., Hummingbird Exceed, if you have it available. Start FEFLOW with the command line switch -display localhost:0 to start FEFLOW with Exceed instead of XVision.

Since I am using the Diagram API to save head vs time data for points at specific elevations, and since this module does not save the data anywhere, when the model crashes and closes itself, I lose this data.  Also, twice when it has crashed, it has somehow corrupted or lost the information for my observation point groups that track flux.  I cannot open the Fluid Flux window from the quick access menu when postprocessing the dac file (it is greyed out).  However, when opening the problem editor for the dac file, the observation groups are there!  I just can't extract the flux information.  And I've already tried to manually extract the flux info without the groups, the points are disconnected and there are more than 1000 total on several different slices.  So extracting this data would be painful to say the least, becuase as far as I can tell you cannot import a database of points in the budget analysis, only lines or polygons ask for a file.  So basically, it is the end of the world when it crashes and corrupts the flux groups.  I am forced to re-run the model, because believe it or not that is more efficient than getting the data back out manually.  And this took 9 days to run!  So I suppose this is also a wish list item - save the diagram API data somewhere so that if the FEFLOW/XVision crashes and exits, the data are retrievable.  But I still have no idea what the problem is with the flux groups.

I aslo just stopped and restarted the simulation, closing all windows before restarting.  But all the windows came back onto the screen, and they won't close once the model starts, either by clicking the x, or by right clicking on the diagram and chosing close from the file menu.  Admittedly there are a lot of diagrams with this simulation because I have the diagram api going and several observation point groups tracking flux, then the automatic observation points the FEFLOW adds reardless of whether you want them or not, along with the window for the finite element mesh and the time step history window.  I closed all these windows except the time step history, but they all came back up after clicking the start button.  So there are 6 windows total.  So how else do you prevent the windows from coming up, and especially with the API, I'm worried if the window isn't active, will I be able to access and save the data at the end of the simulation?

I also have had issues with FEFLOW failing overnight. Figured it could be due to the cleaner banging around on network cables. You can run models consequtively overnight using a batch file, the -hide option allows the user to suppress FEFLOW visual output which could maybe get around the xvision problem.