Computer freezes completely
 

Hi,

I am very new to Gnutella and I was looking for a modern yet light****** client to try it out. Phex at first seemed like the ideal choice but unfortunately I will not be able to use it as it freezes my computer entirely whenever I do a seach and try to click in the interface during or just after searching. Can't afford complete freezes like that, sorry.

I looked through this forum and I tried to install a different, older version of Java (I had Java 6 with runtime 1.6.03 update and I changed to Java 5, runtime 1.5) but it didn't help. I re-downloaded and re-installed Phex as well.

I can see that this freezing is an old GUI bug and it has to do with Java or something. So, maybe you'll fix it one day or maybe my computer is not good enough for Phex: Winxp SP2, PIII 600, 512MB RAM, 2 small 6GB drives.

Anyway, too bad Phex doesn't work for me :(

Gnucleus is light but it takes forever to search.

Are these system freezes caused of extremly high CPU use or by a complete system lockups/crash.
In case your system crashes then they are mostly caused by system, hardware, driver or Java problems or most likely a combination of these. There is not very much we can do about it in the Phex code.

I think the old GUI bug you are refereeing to was caused by deadlocks in Phex. But in that case they should not be related to system freezes. There are currently no known deadlock problems in Phex.

Which operating system do you use?

For me (GNU/Linux on an amd64) Java 6 works well, and I don't experience freezing.

Which kind of computer do you have?

Do you share many files (please don't naem them, just a yes or no suffices :) )?

GregorK:
My computer never freezes or crashes like that, it only did this when I was testing Phex. And in Phex it seems to only happen when searching. There wasn't extreme CPU use that I noticed, only sudden total lockups.

I am not using Java very often and of the few java-based progs I've used none caused such freezes. I install and uninstall a lot of progs actually, but while some of them are buggy and crash, general lock ups never happen (winxp so beats win98 in that department). Well, is it a bad Java install then? Or is Phex known to be allergic to some progs or some configs? I'd like to hear about that.

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arne_bab:
Winxp SP2, PIII 600, 512MB RAM, 2 small 6GB drives
Obviously this is a pretty old computer.

Since I don't have a very large HD space I can't share that many files, obviously. And as a matter of fact I don't. And the ones I am downloading only have a dozen sources in general. So...

Seeing so many posts about Java-related lockups, I have to assume it's bad Java in my computer but maybe I don't know how to clean it up completely for a perfect reinstall.

Thanks for your replies.

Sorry.. I can only guess blindly what it could be..
I have seen many cases where the Java VM crashes or where the system hangs for a few seconds or also where Phex stops reacting.
Sometimes that can be solved by a Java update or a Phex fix.
But system crashes I have seen only very rarely. I know of a few BSOD cases resulting from incompatibility between certain network drivers and Java on high system load. But a different Java version or driver update tend to solve these problems.

The age of your computer should not matter much, you could configure Phex to run with low resources in 'leaf' mode. The only thing that might be a little low is memory. Java likes to eat memory! But I guess Phex should stay below 70-80MB if you don't challenge it to much.

Sometime there can be problems when there are multiple Java version installed on the same system, so you can try to uninstall all Java versions through "Add/Remove Programs" and do a clean install. Java is not very invasive on your system, so there shouldn't be any trouble with uninstall artifacts.

Gregor

This means, that processing your shared files shouldn't be the issue, so we can sort that out.

I guess, I'll have to leave it to Gregor - my knowledge of Javas inner working doesn't go far enough.

GregorK:
Yep, it certainly does seem like something about Java, memory, stuff like that. Which is good in a way because if I can somehow solve the underlying faulty-Java issue, then there is every chance I'll be able to use Phex normally. There was some sort of Java messup on my computer a while ago I seem to recall, and maybe some remnants of that continue to interfere with later java installs/reinstalls and Phex is extra sensitive to that.

Anyway, thanks for all your help, I suppose I'll give Phex another try after a complete system cleanup at a later date.