Omnis 6.1.x PITA

[Bastiaan Olij]

Hey Mats,
> TL must have another focus right now.
To some extent yes, and defend-able to a point. It is one of my 'beefs'
with Studio compared to Classic. Tigerlogic moved Studio much closer to
other 3GL language to take advantage of an OO style of development. The
bonus for us is that it can do more, the flipside is that it leans much
more on the developers knowing what they are doing. Fast forward to
Studio 4.0 and the introduction of Object References (which I love)
you're also requiring the developer to do much more management of what
is going on and introduce the possibility of instability by bad programming.
Studio 6.1 introduces a form of garbage collection but it is still shaky
and a cause of instability in itself. I'm divided on that one, from the
perspective of wanting Omnis to be a more monkey proof development
environment I applaud TLs efforts here and hope they soon get this
mature. The low level geek in me dislikes garbage collection because it
often leads to very dirty programming habits (and that goes beyond
Omnis, I still have occasional shivers of fighting the garbage collector
in my early C# days which would just blow out my memory usage because C#
kept allocating memory in loops and not freeing it up until months
later, part of that being my inexperience in C# at the time obviously so
it is unfair to fully blame C# which in itself is a wonderful C dialect).

That all said, Omnis being a runtime environment, I do believe they can
do a better job at safeguarding Omnis developers and ensuring Omnis does
not crash when you do something dumb (like deleting an object while
still having references to it, a sure crash in most low level languages
but something you can solve in higher level languages and do something
smart).

However I'm also mindful that TL has limited resources and by their own
admission, those resources haven't always been on the right things in
past years. They promised us last year at EurOmnis that was changing and
provided the company stays in the right hands I have no doubt that will
continue down a good path. The fruits of that labour however will take
time to ripen, I don't expect us to start seeing major improvements
until Studio 8 comes out. Still I do hope they give Studio 6 the love it
deserves.

> Using Command + S (Mac) does not solve the problem completely. Sometimes it fails to save, sometimes it crashes hitting Command + S.
>
> But 3 out of 10 times it saves :-)
I do wonder what you're doing different then me, for me success rate is
about 9.5 out of 10.

> Just one single dynamically method creation involved.
Then that is not your issue:) I have hundreds so I run into this
situation much more frequently but I also know when and how and the IDE
does communicate this fairly well. All said and done, I do find this one
of the better parts of Omnis.
> I will investigate in session pooling. 
Well if you are using session pooling (I still don't see the point in a
single threaded environment like Omnis but that discussion has been held
on the omnis list so often, lets not drag that old cow out) keep in mind
you're cycling through a limited amount of available sessions, if
they're all marked as used and not properly freed.... It can be as
simple as having a list somewhere that is still bound to a session that
you thought you're no longer using that keeps that session reserved.
Once you run out, you run out...

Also on the Postgres side of life (if you're using Postgres), it can
become the limiting factor if you've got many idle sessions open.
Default configuration of Postgres is setup to allow roughly 100 sessions
before it starts to complain. You can up this as high as your memory
will allow you to but you do need to configure your server.
>> And I'm very glad my ODB days are long behind me:)
> I am on my way to sql, but there is unfortunately a bunch of existing customers using ODB.
Been there, done that, luckily for us, about 5 years in the past now. We
have a small amount of clients still on ODB but they are simply on a 5
year old version of the product and we're trying to convince them its a
good idea to upgrade. It also means all clients still using ODB are on
Studio 4 which may also explain why this is not an issue for us.
>
> There is no problem with the license server (yet). Just local problem and mostly related to ODB.
Good to hear because I remember the issues you had in early 6.0 days,
brrrrrrrr.
Hope you get through this one too mate.

Cheers,

Bas