Al,

Do you think there's a chance that this problem occurred with the release of v3.68?

v3.68 fixed a 10-year old bug with thread synchronization. This is the only change I can imagine would have an impact on the the FOC behavior. It is possible that the added synchronization brings out new problems if underlying drivers are not well behaved when accessed concurrently by the same application. The added synchronization in v3.68 combined with unexpected resource locking by drivers may possibly result in a deadlock situation.

If/when you have time to try this out, please e-mail me and I will send you links to download v3.67 and v3.68. Comparing these two should give you a clear indication whether the problem is caused by the synchronization added in v3.68 or not.

Another user reported seeing the same problem as you when he upgraded from v3.66 to v3.72. Apparently the problem appeared sometime between these two versions. To me, v3.68 looks like the most likely one, but I need to get this verified before I can work on a solution.

Now, in your original post you said you were going to backlevel to v3.70 which made it sound like this bug is new in v3.71. If this is the case, can you confirm that v3.70 indeed works fine and v3.71 does not? My thinking is that v3.70 has the same problem and that you need to go back all the way to v3.67 before the problem goes away. If I can get this confirmed, then we're half the way to solving the issue...

Thanks,
Peter

I had an opportunity to test this theory today.

I've been re-creating thumbnail icons as EAs. Several thousand files. I turned on Automatic thumbnail creation and Icon thumbnailing.

I used the FOC to navigate through directories, letting it finish creating thumbnails in each dir before moving on.

With 3.74, it seems reasonably OK unless I open two PMV windows and use two FOCs to do the thumbnail creation. In that situation, one of the FOCs locks up, CPU goes to 100% and the system comes to an effective stop: the clock does not advance seconds.

I have CADH installed, so I can C-A-D, run TOP and find that one instance of PMV is using 100% of the CPU. I can kill it from TOP, and the system resumes normally. The other PMV's FOC continues to create thumbnails fine.

I can start another instance of PMV and can bring the system down again pretty regularly this way, given enough files that need thumbnails created for them.

I installed PMV 3.66 instead of 3.78, and for a while it seemed to not exhibit this behavior. I though you were on to something, but about a half-hour later it did the same thing. Since I was leaving the house for a while, I left it running at 100% for four hours. When I returned, the clock was advancing jerkily (updating every ten seconds or so) but the CPU (Pulse) was still at 100% and no new thumbnails had been created as far as I could tell.

I used CADH & TOP to kill it, and things resumed as normal again.

I can't give you better clues that that.

Al,

It seems like something in your disk system is deadlocking. Sorry I can't provide more help than that.

Thanks,
Peter