Is there any internal timeout in Microsoft UIAutomation? - com

I am using the UI Automation COM-to-.NET Adapter to read the contents of the target Google Chrome browser that plays a FLASH content on Windows 7. It works.
I succeeded to get the content and elements. Everything works fine for some time but after few hours the elements become inaccessible.
The (AutomationElement).FindAll() returns 0 children.
Is there any internal undocumented Timeout used by UIAutomation ?
According to this IUIAutomation2 interface
There are 2 timeouts but they are not accessible from IUIAutomation interface.
IUIAutomation2 is supported only on Windows 8 (desktop apps only).
So I believe there is some timeout.
I made a workaround that restarts the searching and monitoring of elements from the beginning of the desktop tree but the elements are still not available.
After some time (not sure how much) the elements are available again.
My requirements are to read the values all the time as fast as possible but this behavior makes a damage to the whole architecture.
I read somewhere that there is some timeout of 3 minutes but not sure.
if there is a timeout, is it possible to change it ?
Is it possible to restart something or release/dispose something ?
I can't find anything on MSDN.
Does anybody have any idea what is happening and how to resolve ?

Thanks for this nicely put question. I have a similar issue with a much different setup. I'm on Win7, using UIAutomationCore.dll directly from C# to test our application-under-development. After running my sequence of actions & event subscriptions and all the other things, I intermittently observe that the UIA interface stops working (about 8-10min in my case, but I'm heavily using the UIA interface).
Many different things including dispatching the COM interface, sleeping at different places failed. The funny revelation was I managed to use the AccEvent.exe (part of SDK like inspect.exe) during the test and saw that events also stopped flowing to AccEvent, too. So it wasn't my client's interface that stopped, but it was rather the COM-server (or whatever the UIAutomationCore does) that stopped responding.
As a solution (that seems to work most of the time - or improve the situation a lot), I decided I should give the application-under-test some breathing point, since using the UIA puts additional load on it. This could be a smartly-put sleep points in your client, but instead of sleeping a set time, I'm monitoring the processor load of the application and waiting until it settles down.
One of the intermittent errors I receive when the problem manifests itself is "... was unable to call any of the subscribers..", and my search resulted in an msdn page saying they have improved things on CUIAutomation8 interface, but as this is Windows8 specific, I didn't have the chance to try that yet.
I should also add that I also reduced the number of calls to UIA by incorporating more ui caching (FindAllBuildCache), as the less the frequency of back-and-forth the better it is for the uia. Thanks to the answer of Guy in another question: UI Automation events stop being received after a while monitoring an application and then restart after some time

Related

Can I poll my USB HID device without first sending a command

I was able to make a working HID USB stack on my "StartUSB for PIC" board for the 18F2550 microcontroller. I based it on one of the MLA libraries, which was made for the 18F45K50 (MLA 2018_11_26, hid_custom, picdem_fs_usb_k50.x), but I converted it to work with the 18F2550 (there might have been easier ways, but only learned to work with PIC about 1 month ago). On the host side, I'm using LibUsbDotNet (also here, there might be easier ways - the documentation on this library really sucks) on a Windows 10 machine.
I'm using the HID class, full speed, and all seems to work. Although, I get some random errors on the host PC (see below), but doing one close/re-open cycle on the host side when getting the error is kind of solving it. Dirty, but it works. So I kind of ignore this now.
Win32Error:Win32Error:GetOverlappedResult Ep 0x01
995:The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request.
I'm not an expert on USB (yet). But all examples I'm seeing are based on 1) you send first a command to the device and 2) then you retrieve the answer from the device. I did some performance tests, and see that this indeed shows that I can do about 500 cycles/second. I think that is correct, because each cycle, sending command and retrieving answer, each takes 1 msec.
But do I really need to send a command? Can't I just keep reading endlessly, and when the device has somthing to say, it does send the data in an IN transaction, and when not it ignores which creates a timeout on the host side. That would mean that I can poll at 1000 cycles/second? Unfortunately, I have tried it by changing my implementation on the PIC, but I get very weird results. I think I have issues with suspend mode. That brings me to another question - how can I make the device get out of suspend mode (means that not the host, but the device should be triggering this event). I have searched the MLA library for command such as "wakeup", "resume", ... but couldn't find anything.
So, to summarize, 2 questions:
Conceptual: Can I send data from device to host without being requested for it by a command from the host?
For PIC experts: How can I have a device trigger for a wakeup from suspend mode?
And indeed, the answer is Yes on the first question.
In the meantime, I found another link on the web that contains a Visual Studio C# implementation of a USB library including all the source files.
If you're interested, this is the link
This C# host implementation works as a charm. Without sending a command to the device, I get notified immediately if a button is pressed. Great!
It also proofs that my earlier device implementation based on the original MicroChip MLA, is 100% correct. I stress tested the implementation by sending a "toggle LED command" as fast as I could, and I reach 1000 commands/second. Again great!
I think that LibUsbDotNet isn't that perfect after all. As I wrote above, I get rather unstable communication (Win32Error). But with this implementation, I don't get a single error, even after running for half an hour # 1000 commands/second.
So for me, case closed.

Continuous device and connection issues with routed Tokbox session

We’ve been using the Tokbox platform for several months now with a Javascript web-client as well as an Android phone client, where sessions and connections are managed by a Python server. While integration and bring-up went well on both ends (client and server), we continue to encounter problems with the in-session audio and video experience.
Sessions are always routed and always between two participants only, with much use of a collaborative editor.
The in-session experience is like a coin toss: we never know how it’s going to go, and that’s becoming a business threat.
Web-Client: A/V Resources
The most common problem is the acquisition of audio and/or video: at the beginning of a session, one or the other participants may have problems hearing or seeing the other. Allocating a new connection to establish new streams does not fix that, nor does restarting the browser.
Question: What’s the recommended way to detect possible resource locks (e.g. does another application hog the camera/microphone)?
Web-Client: Network
Bandwidth and packet loss are a challenge, for example this inspector graph:
Audio and video of both participants is all over the place, and while we can not control the network connections the web-client should be able to reliably give useful information.
Question: Other than continuous connection monitoring with getStats() and maybe the experimental navigator.connection property, how can the web-client monitor network connectivity?
Pre-Call Test
We recommend to customers to run a pre-call test and have implemented it on our site as well. However, results of that test often times do not reflect the in-session connectivity. Worse, a pre-call test may detect a low (no video) bandwidth while Skype works just fine.
Question: How can that be?
I'm a member of the TokBox development team. I remember you reported an issue with the Python SDK, thanks for that!
Web-Client: A/V Resources
Most acquisition issues are detected by the JS SDK and if they aren't then we'd really like to hear about it! Please report reproduction steps or affected session IDs to TokBox support (referencing this StackOverflow question): https://support.tokbox.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Most acquisition errors appear as OT_HARDWARE_UNAVAILABLE or OT_MEDIA_ERR_ABORTED errors. Are you detecting and surfacing these errors to your users? There is also the special OT_CHROME_MICROPHONE_ACQUISITION_ERROR error which is due to a known issue with Chrome that has been mostly fixed since Chrome 63 (see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=4799).
Web-Client: Network
Unfortunately this is one of the more difficult issues to troubleshoot. Yes, Subscriber#getStats() is the best tool we have at our disposal and is a wrapper around the native RTCPeerConnection#getStats() function. Unfortunately we don't have much control over the values returned by the native function and if you think our SDK is returning incorrect values when compared with values from RTCPeerConnection#getStats() then please let us know!
It would be worthwhile confirming whether the issue is reproducible in all browsers or only a particular one. If you have detailed data regarding the inaccuracy of the native RTCPeerConnection#getStats() function then we could work together to report it to the browser vendor(s).
Fortunately we have just released the new Publisher#getStats() function which lets you get the publisher side of the stats. This should help you narrow down the cause of a connectivity issue to either a publisher or subscriber side. Please let us know if this helps with tracking down these issues.
Pre-Call Test
Again, these tests are based on Subscriber#getStats() which in turn are based on RTCPeerConnection#getStats(), the accuracy of which is out of our hands, but we'd love any reproduction steps to either fix a bug in our client SDK or report a bug to the browser vendors.
Just to confirm though, when you say you've implemented a pre-call test in your site, did you use the official JavaScript network test module? https://github.com/opentok/opentok-network-test-js This is actually what's used by the TokBox pre-call test.
#Aiham, thanks for responding, I've been looking at the the new Publisher#getStats() you linked to (thank you!), so we too can give our users some way of visibly seeing the network conditions that might be affected the quality of their call (and who's causing it). However, it seems as though bytes / packets sent goes up sharply as the number of subscribers increases, even though we're in a routed session.
Am I wrong to expect the Publisher#getStats() statistics to stay fairly stable regardless of the number of subscribers then receiving that stream in a routed session? I expected the nature of a routed call to mean it's sent once to the OpenTok Media Servers, and the statistics would end there.

How to capture screen shot of 1000 web pages concurrently in c#

I need to get screenshot of 1000 URLs using Parallel.Foreach in windows service. I tried to use WebBrowser control but it throws error since it runs only in STA. Kindly tell me how to achieve this task using Parallel.Foreach...
Edit : I am using a third party trial version DLL in below code to process it...
Parallel.ForEach(webpages, webPage=>
{
GetScreenShot(webPage);
}
public void GetScreenShot(string webPage)
{
WebsitesScreenshot.WebsitesScreenshot _Obj;
_Obj = new WebsitesScreenshot.WebsitesScreenshot();
WebsitesScreenshot.WebsitesScreenshot.Result _Result;
_Result = _Obj.CaptureWebpage(webPage);
if (_Result == WebsitesScreenshot.
WebsitesScreenshot.Result.Captured)
{
_Obj.ImageFormat = WebsitesScreenshot.
WebsitesScreenshot.ImageFormats.PNG;
_Obj.SaveImage(somePath);
}
_Obj.Dispose();
}
Most of the time this code runs fine upto processing of 80 urls but after that some tasks are being blocked. I don't know why...
Some times error is ContextSwitchDeadlock....as given below...
ContextSwitchDeadlock was detected
Message: The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x44d3a8 to COM context 0x44d5d0 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.
This error indicates that a CLR thread is not sending any messages for an extended period of time. If a process is resource starved causing extended waits during processing this error can occur.
Given that you are trying to process 1000 web pages simultaneously, it would be no surprise that at least some of the threads will become resource starved. Personally, it is surprising to me that you can hit 80 websites without seeing errors.
Back off the number of websites you are trying to processing in parallel and your problems will likely disappear. Since you are running the trial version, there is little else you can do. If you licensed the commercial version you might be able to get support from the vendor. But at a guess, they would simply tell you to do the same thing.
The Websites.Screenshot library can be quite resource intensive depending upon the web page, esp. if the pages have flash. Think of it as being logically equivalent to opening 80 tabs simultaneously in a web browser.
You don't mention whether you are using the 32-bit or the 64-bit version. But the 64-bit version is likely to have fewer resource constraint, esp. memory. IMHO The .Net framework does a poor job of minimizing memory usage, so memory problems can crop up earlier than you would think.
ADDED
Please try limiting the number of threads threads first, e.g.
Parallel.ForEach(
Webpages,
new ParallelOptions { MaxDegreeOfParallelism = 10 }, // 10 thread limit
webPage => { GetScreenShot(webPage); }
);
Without access to the source code, you may not be able to change the threading model at all. You might also try setting the timeout to a higher value.
I don't have this control personally and am not willing to install it on my machine to answer a question re: changing the threading model. Unless it is a documented feature, you probably won't be able to do it without changing or at least inspecting the source.

Cocoa Distributed Objects, Long Polling, launchd and "Not Responding" in Activity Monitor

Scenario:
I have a Distributed-objects-based IPC between a mac application and a launchd daemon (written with Foundation classes). Since I had issues before regarding asynchronous messaging (e.g. I have a registerClient: on the server's root object and whenever there's an event the server's root object notifies / calls a method in the client's proxy object), I did long-polling which meant that the client "harvests" lists of events / notifications from the daemon. This "harvest" is done through a server object method call, which then returns an NSArray instance.
It works pretty well, until for a few seconds, the server object's process (launched thru launchd) starts being labeled red with the "(Not responding)" tag beside it (inside Activity Monitor). Like I said, functionally, it works well, but we just want to get rid of this "Not responding" label.
How can I prevent this "Not responding" tag?
FYI, I already did launchd-based processes before and this is the first time I did long-polling. Also, I tried NSSocketPortNameServer-based connections and also NSSocketPort-based ones. They didn't have this problem. Locking wasn't also an issue 'coz the locks used were only NSCondition's and we logged and debugged the program and it seems like the only locking "issue" is on the harvesting part, which actually, functionally works. Also, client-process is written in PyObjC while server process was written using ObjC.
Thanks in advance.
Sample the process to find out what it's doing or waiting on.
Peter's correct in the approach, though you may be able to figure it out through simple inspection. "Not responding" means that you're not processing events on your event queue for at least 5 seconds (used to be 2 seconds, but they upped it in 10.4). For a UI process, this would create a spinning wait cursor, but for a non-UI process, you're not seeing the effects as easily.
If this is a runloop-based program, it means you're probably doing something with a blocking (synchronous) operation that should be done with the run loop and a callback (async). Alternately, you need a second thread to process your blocking operations so your mainthread can continue to respond to events.
My problem was actually the call for getting a process's PID using the signature FNDR... that part caused the "Not responding" error and it never was the locks or the long-polling part. Sorry about this guys. But thank God I already found the answer.

Compact Framework - System.Threading.Timer stops when the user turns off the screen

I have an application that needs to "poll" a webservice to see if the user has any new messages waiting. I have no control over the webservice so I cannot switch to a "push" mechanism, I'm stuck making a request every X number of seconds to see what's available.
I am using a System.Threading.Timer to make the request every so often, but am encountering a few problems. The biggest is that it stops running when the phone is sent into "standby" mode (screen off, but still able to get calls and email/txt notifications).
I'd really like it to behave like other background applications. What can I do to make it work without being too big of a drain on the battery?
Hate to answer my own question, but I was pointed to this, which was able to perform even when the device is asleep. Looks like it's working perfectly.
There's nothing you can do, AFAIK. Standby mode is meant to suspend the processor to save power, and there's no way your code can execute if the processor isn't running. There are things your application can do to prevent the device from going into standby mode, but this really isn't advisable at all.
Yep. Similar to how MusiGenesis has answered, you won't be able to do much without keeping the device up and running. Similar to how some phones will notify that "Game/App Running" and thus your battery is being slapped around.
What about writing an interface from your phone to leverage text messaging (which still works) and get it to send a text message to the web service? Would that be possible? I'm guessing that sort of method might also stop running, but I figure it's a thought?
I'm not sure about compact framework, but in Win32 there is WaitableTimer that can wake up computer from standby. It takes some native calls though as there's no wrapper in .Net.
Although you can't modify the webservice, you might be able to add a second "shadow" webservice in between your clients and the original webservice. The shadow webservice could poll the original webservice and then "push" anything it finds out to the PDAs.
I think you might still have the same problem, though. I've never done "push" from a webservice, but I think it's basically implemented by having the client make an initial call to a webservice method that takes a delegate to a method in the client, which the webservice then hangs onto. When the webservice needs to push something, it calls that delegate. If the client has gone into standby mode in the meantime, the attempt to call the delegate from the server will fail.