Visual Build irregular freeze/hangs

[danielh]

Hi,

We using Visual Build Professional Version 7.6 to build our software. Our nightly builds have a due time of about 8 hours. They are running at Windows 7 Professional x86 VMs. Lately, some of those builds freeze, meaning Visual Build is hanging at a step and if you click into the GUI it becomes a white screen. You only can kill the Visual Build process with the Task Manager. I have observed, that Visual Build usual freeze at one of the following steps:

Delete folder from C:\
Send Email


Please help us to solve the problem!

[kinook]

http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?t=3892

[danielh]

1) Make sure that you have the latest version of Visual Build installed.
At the moment, we have not opportunity to install a new version, because the VMs are stateless

2) Uncheck Tools | User Options | Display | Automatically refresh panes during build.
Is unset

3) Make sure that Tools | Application Options | Advanced | Maximum step output macro length is not set to 0 and is less than 10,000,000 (the default is 1,048,576).
Is set to default

4) Build with the console app instead of the GUI app.
To manage some builds manually, we need the GUI

5) Stop anti-virus software on the build machine or add an exclusion for Visual Build to its active scanning.
No AV is running

6) Disable Windows Update (and run manually).
Is disabled

7) Ensure the host computer's storage system is optimized to minimize disk queue (one user reconfigured RAID so that it became faster and hanging disappeared).
Whats does this mean?

8) Increase the amount of RAM on the machine and/or VM guest.
The VMs each one has 3GB of RAM, should be enough

9) Repair or reinstall Windows, preferably Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 or later.
The VMs are stateless. After restart VM, all would be the old state

[kinook]

1) Make sure that you have the latest version of Visual Build installed.
At the moment, we have not opportunity to install a new version, because the VMs are stateless
Might be worth trying w/ v8. We will send a temporary key to use to try it.

4) Build with the console app instead of the GUI app.
To manage some builds manually, we need the GUI
Is there any way to rework it so you don't need to manage manually -- maybe prompt up front for manual information and then launch visbuildcmd.exe?

7) Ensure the host computer's storage system is optimized to minimize disk queue (one user reconfigured RAID so that it became faster and hanging disappeared).
Whats does this mean?I don't know -- one customer reported that doing this resolved the problem.

8) Increase the amount of RAM on the machine and/or VM guest.
The VMs each one has 3GB of RAM, should be enough
Might be worth trying bumping it up to maybe 8GB.


One other thing you could try is adding /mta to the command-line of all invocations of visbuildpro.exe.
http://www.kinook.com/VisBuildPro/Manual/command_linegui.htm

We have never been able to reproduce this problem (we do all of our builds in VMWare guests, and we've also run many multiple simultaneous chained levels of long-running builds with heavy CPU and disk load and build output). If you can strip it down to something that we can build that still reproduces the problem, please send the info (plus any details about your VM environment and hardware and how Visual Build is being called). Thanks.

Note by Admin 5/7/2014: The /mta option resolved the problem in this case.