Intel® Software Network

Dear Fortran Friends!

For a couple of years I am experiencing the same problem with the debugger in Developer Studio (Digital/Compaq Visual Studio) and Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 (Intel Visual Fortran v8, v9):

When stepping through a Fortran app in the debugger, sometimes VS "hangs" and the task manager shows me that VS is consuming almost 100% of CPU time, but VS doesn't respond anymore to my actions. Sometimes VS reports an error that it cannot return from an "internal operation".
I had a customer who told me that he experienced the same and that he could step further in his app after waiting for more than 10 minutes. I never had that much patience. So I always killed VS and started anew.

However today, within the last hour I had to kill and re-start VS more than 10 times, and now I am fed up.

Does anyone has some help for me (I am still using VS2005 w/SP1 and IVF 9.1.3375.2005)?

Does the problem still exist with IVF v10.0 or IVF v10.1?

Does it help to change to VS2008?

By the way,  a couple of customers are reporting the same VS/debug behaviour, I wonder whether this has ever been discussed here.

Jörg Kuthe
www.qtsoftware.de

I've never encountered a problem like that myself and don't recall hearing before of a customer seeing it.  I have seen issues caused by misbehaving virus or other program-monitoring software.  Sometimes I suggest booting Wimdows into "Safe Mode" and seeing if you can reproduce the problem.

I doubt that this is a problem tied to the compiler version.

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Steve

Doctor Fortran: intel.com/software/drfortran

What was the code doing when it hung up?  I think I remember having a problem of this sort if I tried to single-step through code containing a large array operation. Something like:

A = 0.0

where A is a good sized 2-d array.

In my case, the cure was to avoid stepping through the code. Instead I'd use breakpoints, or "run to cursor".

I know that stepping over a statement with an array operation can keep the processor / debugger quite busy. But the bug I experience happens randomly.
Unfortunately, I have not the slightest idea what could be the reason for this debugger fault.

But again, it appears to me that I have to repeat what I have said:

I have been working with Digital, Compaq and Intel Visual Fortran for about a decade now.
And I have used a couple of various PCs running Win95, Win98, NT and XP.
I am working on customers' sites too. They have their own PCs, their own virus scanners etc. and their own CVF/IVF licences.
My company has been a Digital Fortran and a Compaq Fortran reseller and now is an Intel software reseller for quite a while. Because of this I hear from customers complaining about the debugger. They encounter the same problem: the Visual studio debugger tends to "hang up" and VS stops responding. The last error message we see is, that VS is busy and cannot return from an "internal operation".

Steve, if you have never encountered that problem you are lucky. I can reproduce this behaviour on any machine I am running VS2003/5 and IVF (or CVF) on by just starting a debugging session. Sometimes it takes a couple of minutes until the debugger "hangs up", but it happens. It might be that this is problem occurs only on PCs equipped with the German Windows version, but I can hardly believe this.

So, I hope you believe me know that there is a problem with the debugger.

It also might help that other users that experience the same problem second me.

I´ver never had debugging problems with VS2008 and IVF10.1 so far. My Windows is a german XP and VS2008 is the english version.

I´ve only had a non responding VS6 CVF6.6 system when I used the mouse scroll from time to time. That was very annoying.

Markus

I experience the freezing problem with CVF sometimes (German version of VS and Windows). I am not sure if the use of the mouse wheel is influencing that behavior, but it could be possible. Some years ago I got the advice from Compaq (or still DEC) to cure the problem by exiting VS and deleting the .opt file in the project folder. IVF has no .opt file, but the fact I was looking for it lets me assume that I had the freezing problem in IVF as well.

The equivalent of the .opt in VS2002 and later is the .sou file.  It is a hidden file so you may need to reveal it.

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Steve

Doctor Fortran: intel.com/software/drfortran

There was a brief mention of something similar by myself and Jim Dempsey back in January
see : "Mysterious run time error with IVF 9.0"
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forums/thread/30246404.aspx

It seems to be an intermittent problem with Visual Studio (devenv)

Les

Hi Jörg,

did you find a solution for your problem? Yesterday I got a new machine and now VS2008 with IVF10.1 stops responding while debugging. Very annoying!

Markus

Hello Markus,

thank you asking.
No, I still have the problem that the debugger in VS (2005, english version) hangs up sometimes. I have switched to v10.1.021 meanhwile (32-Bit, WinXP 2SE), but the problem did not vanish. Also, I still don't see any regularity in the cirumstances when this crash happens and have no idea what could be the reason.

Joerg Kuthe
www.qtsoftware.de

This sounds to me as a typical ctfmon.exe problem. Search this forum for ctfmon.exe and then Google it. Maybe your problem will be solved.

 

Sabalan

Hello,

I do have the same experience .
It happens for me on:
- CVF 6.6b
- IVF 9.0,9.1,10 and 10.1 in combination with VS 2003 and VS2005 (both  German)
based on Win XP Prof German.

Frank

I agree with Sabalan that the "Language Bar" (ctfmon.exe) is very likely to blame.  It has this effect on many applications.  Disabling the "Language Bar" feature usually resolves such problems.

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Steve

Doctor Fortran: intel.com/software/drfortran

Steve,

 

I am afraid that it is not enough to disable the language bar and you are still going to see ctfmon.exe running in the background in the task manager . Ctfmon.exe has to do with “advanced text services” and should be deactivated through Control Panel. You disable the language bar by deactivating the "advanced text services" (ctfmon.exe) but you do not deactivate ctfmon.exe by right-clicking on the language bar and disabling it.

 

Those who have the problem described in this thread: See e.g. here for a short description about what ctfmon.exe does and how to disable it.

 

Sabalan

Thank you all for your replies. I have followed Sabalan's advice, got rid of the language bar and kicked ctfmon.exe out of the system about a week ago. At first I believed that I got rid of my "debugger problem" and was happy. But now after a couple of days of programming and debugging, unfortunately I have to say that the problem still exists. At least with VS2005. My impression is that the debugger does not "freeze" so often as it did in the past.
However, I have to state that without ctfmon.exe the CVF debugger (I am still using CVF 6.6.a) runs much more stable. Until today I haven't had a single crash and that is in fact a real improvement. Thanks a lot!

Jörg Kuthe
www.qtsoftware.de

I removed the cftmon.exe but while I still have a freezing debugger. It´s very annoying when you want to debug a situation that needs time to reproduce and than *bang* you´re dead. It seems, that when you´ve had one crash, the next one will follow very soon. It took about 2-3 hours before it first appears and then nearly every time.

I think that it is IVF related, because I haven´t got any freezing debugger while debugging a C# project in VS2008. I have to say, that I haven´t debugged C# very often, but still 0 freeze on the count list, while IVF is still growing :-/

I use Windows XP Professional German with Service Pack 2, VS2008 english and IVF 10.1.024 IA-32.

Markus

The next time this happens (and, unfortunately, it sounds like you won't have to wait long :-), look at the system with the task manager.  Is Visual Studio (devenv.exe) comatose (i.e., not using any cpu time) or is it perhaps cpu bound?  It could appear to be "frozen" in either case.

 

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Jeff Arnold

devenv.exe uses 50% cpu time (I use Core2 Duo E6550 2.33GHz). I get a notifier icon from VS that it is delayed and that I should wait. Because waiting an hour was not enough I think that there is no other solution then killing the devenv process

I just started to work. Let´s see, how much it takes to the next freeze :-)

Thanks for that information.  The fact that Visual Studio is cpu-bound rather than blocked could be important.

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Jeff Arnold

Updating to VS2008 SP1 doesn´t solve the debugger freezing problem...