Preferences lost after crash

[Philip Meyer]

6.2b1. WinXP Pro.

I just experienced a crash (reported in plugins mailing list) which happened when navigating through the Alien BBC menus on a SqueezeBoxG.

Operation `""': no method found, argument in overloaded package Class::DBI::Object::Has::Been::Deleted at /PerlApp/YAML/Node.pm line 26.

However, when I restarted the server, I noticed that my the web front end came up in the default skin, not my usual Fishbone skin. Alas, it appears that my slimserver.pref file has been overwritten.

This happened a couple of weeks back too.

There was a discussion thread recently about changing the way that the prefs were flushed to disk. Has the code changed in the last week? As this problem happened to me a couple of weeks back, I assume no changes have happened yet.

My slimserver.prefs file now has what I imagine are the standard default values, and there's no backup of my prefs to go back to. Looking in the file, there are paths that do point at my installation folder, which is not the standard path. I guess slimserver writes defaults to the file, taking into account the install dir.

Perhaps slimserver had some memory problem; the preferences that were held in memory got overwritten, and thus caused slimserver to crash, but at the same time the preferences were flushed to disk?

It's quite annoying to have to re-enter all preferences. Is it safe to take a copy of the pref file as a backup in case this happens again - ie. to restore, can I overwrite the pref file? What if new prefs are added, etc, would slimserver cope with an old pref file in a new version?

Shall I raise a bug?

Phil

[Dan Sully]

* Philip Meyer shaped the electrons to say...

> It's quite annoying to have to re-enter all preferences. Is it safe to
> take a copy of the pref file as a backup in case this happens again - ie.
> to restore, can I overwrite the pref file? What if new prefs are added,
> etc, would slimserver cope with an old pref file in a new version?

Yes - it will "upgrade" the pref file.

>Shall I raise a bug?

Looks like Dean raised one for you already:

http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1852

You've seen this with both AlienBBC & Live365?

Any patterns you can see? Have you done a rescan recently?

-D
--
This knob controls the thing that changes when you turn it. - noah

[Philip Meyer]

>Looks like Dean raised one for you already:
>
>http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1852
>
My platform is actually WinXP, but I can't correct the attribute on the bug. I added the recent problem to that bug report.

>You've seen this with both AlienBBC & Live365?
>
Yes. With the most recent occurance, I wasn't really doing much. Nothing was playing, I was just navigating through the AlienBBC menus - I scrolled down about 5 options at the topmost level (ie. somewhere around Radio 5 Live). I can't remember if I pressed right-arrow, or if I was just about to, when the connection was dropped. Upon restarting the service, the prefs had been lost. I hadn't modified any preferences in the lifetime of that process, as far as I can remember.

>Any patterns you can see? Have you done a rescan recently?
>
I do a timed rescan at 3am each morning. I was running 29-07-05 nightly. I was having trouble with a rescan today, but I can't remember now if I had done a rescan before or after the prefs were lost, sorry.

Phil

[Philip Meyer]

>> It's quite annoying to have to re-enter all preferences. Is it safe to
>> take a copy of the pref file as a backup in case this happens again - ie.
>> to restore, can I overwrite the pref file? What if new prefs are added,
>> etc, would slimserver cope with an old pref file in a new version?
>
>Yes - it will "upgrade" the pref file.
>
I've just set up my preferences again, having reverted to 6.1.1, and was going to take a backup.

I notice that the size of my slimserver.pref file is over 75Mb! Does that sound correct? I assume something is very wrong!

checkVersionInterval: 1 =
....
checkVersionInterval: 86400 =

There's loads of other groups of lines, such as plugin_biography_cache: 999999 =

I guess that SlimServer has dumped the prefs to file, but something initialised the data structures, and all blank entries have gone into the file.

Maybe this is one reason why the memory footprint for SlimServer is high, because the data structures have been initialised statically, and aren't using memory dynamically? My slim.exe process is currently using 92Mb.