Intermittent Access Violation ID2D1RenderTarget::EndDraw - c++-cli

I have my Direct2D drawing loop which is running successfully for hours, even days, except for the intermittent access violation error. There is no pattern for this to happen, mostly after several hours, sometimes after just a few seconds.
Unhandled exception at 0x5f990099 (d3d11.dll) in XX.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x00000fe0.
I am keeping a log of the return HRESULT of EndDraw if not successful. All the previous EndDraws seem to return S_OK. There aren't any other failed Direct2D API calls prior to this one.
ID2D1RenderTarget object is not NULL.
The Drawing loop is protected in a critical section.
Any ideas how to catch where this is coming from? Maybe the device or render target is entering some invalid state which I need to discover?

Related

Exception access violation (msvcrt.dll)

I received silent crashes, and in order to find their reasons, I collected a crash dump. When I try to debug it, I get the error
Exception thrown at 0x748E89EA (msvcrt.dll) in app.exe.10228.dmp:
0xC0000005: Access violation reading location 0x0457351A.
I can’t find out exactly where this error occurs, because it occurs spontaneously during working.
After all, in vb.net there is no direct memory access, where could this error be? Is it possible that it is from the dll files that the program uses?
Call stack of thread in which appeared exception:
ntdll!NtWaitForMultipleObjects+c
KERNELBASE!WaitForMultipleObjectsEx+133
KERNELBASE!WaitForMultipleObjects+18
kernel32!WerpReportFaultInternal+3b7 kernel32!WerpReportFault+9d
kernel32!BasepReportFault+19 KERNELBASE!UnhandledExceptionFilter+2a2
ntdll!__RtlUserThreadStart+3a4e6 ntdll!_RtlUserThreadStart+1b

Preventing Exceptions without Stack Frames with Error Exception Handler and Shutdown Sequences

I've run over a somewhat little problem over the week. The error message upfront this is about:
[30-Dec-2012 15:19:32] PHP Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0
I think it is because my error handler (see below for details) is turning any error into an exception. I might should prevent that in case there is no stack frame.
Is there an easy way to find out if there is any stack frame or not in PHP?
Details:
On one of my websites I've got an error handler running that is turning every error into an exception, the common ErrorException to be precise.
I introduced it some time ago because the site is mainly legacy code and I wanted to have any issue result in an exception I can finally "catch" in a streamlined fashion an exception handler and give the request a stop.
I put this into class of it's own, the handler is registered and also in parallel an output buffer is opened to catch the output up until the exception is thrown. Basically code like this:
// register output buffering
$r = ob_start(array($this, 'handleBuffer'));
// register error handler
$this->_originalErrorHandler = set_error_handler(array($this, 'handleError'));
// register exception handler
$this->_originalExceptionHandler = set_exception_handler(array($this, 'handleException'));
This worked all fine and dandy until I decided to add another output buffering class into the mix. Just one that catches as well all output and then can do some "post production" on the website, including checking for HTML problems (yes, it's all a bit legacy so actually this is a bit duck-taped, I know). That also worked very fine btw. however not when I made a mistake in the new component:
[30-Dec-2012 15:19:32] PHP Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0
This is basically my problem. Is there an easy way to prevent getting these errors? I somewhat know why the error is given but I'm not so entirely sure so it's hard for me to really circumvent the problem. I tried to release the new output buffer before the script enters the new shutdown phase because I thought this would cause this. But this didn't make it.
Your problem indicates that you are using an EOL (End Of Life) version of PHP (specifically PHP < 5.3.0), which means it's no longer supported. This issue comes from throwing an exception where no strack frame exists and as such the old engine did not know how to handle those exceptions properly.
This can be due to a couple of different reasons. Some of the most common ones are as follows:
You threw an exception from inside an error handler or exception handler.
You threw an exception from inside a destructor.
You threw an exception from inside a callback (like an output buffering callback function).
Here's an example that demonstrates your problem under some of those circumstances...
function myErrorHandler($errno, $errstr, $errfile, $errline)
{
throw new ErrorException($errstr, $errno, 0, $errfile, $errline);
}
function myExceptionHandler($exception) {
echo "We got an exception with message: '{$exception->getMessage()}'";
}
function myCallBack($contents) {
trigger_error('ohnoes!'); // You can't throw an error from the output buffer callback function in older versions of PHP < 5.3
}
class Foo {
public function __destruct() {
trigger_error('ohnoes!'); // You can't throw an error from a destructor in older versions of PHP < 5.3
}
}
set_error_handler('myErrorHandler');
set_exception_handler('myExceptionHandler');
The above code would cause you to see the fatal error you described here...
ob_start("myCallBack");
... and here...
$foo = new foo;
This problem has been fixed in PHP >= 5.3.0 so you should not see this issue if you were using the most current version of PHP.
The simplest fix is to upgrade your PHP. If that is not an option you must consider these facts that you can not throw exceptions where PHP does not expect them to be thrown (in callback functions, error handlers, exceptions handlers, etc... -- which are actually all considered to be callbacks to PHP).
The other thing is you should not be turning every error into an exception in this way. If what you are doing is as the code I supplied demonstrates (i.e. throwing an exception from inside the error handler -- thus turning every error into an exception) then you are going to cause yourself a lot of pain and with virtually no benefit. PHP errors are not meant to be handled. They are meant to inform the client of a problem (the client being the person writing the PHP code), or potential problem. Handling the error itself is not as simple as turning every error into an exception and then handling that exception, because not every error should be exceptional. For instance, E_NOTICE level errors have no place in exception handling. They are primarily used to notify you of a potential for a bug, not that there is necessarily something buggy with your code and not to mention that most of them can't even be handled easily in user-space code (they mostly require re-factoring the code itself). I strongly advice against this poor practice.

To fault or not to fault

I'm having a discussion with a colleague about when to throw faults and when not to throw faults in a WCF service.
One opinion is, that we only throw faults when the service operation could not do its work due to some error; and something may be in an invalid state because of it. So, some examples:
ValidateMember(string name, string password, string country)
-> would throw a fault if the mandatory parameters are not passed, because the validation itself could not be executed;
-> would throw fault if some internal error occured, like database was down
-> would return a status contract in all other cases, that specifies the result of the validation (MemberValidated, WrongPassword, MemberNotKnown,...)
GetMember(int memberId)
-> would only throw fault if something is down, in all other cases it would return the member or null if not found
The other opinion is that we should also throw faults when GetMember does not find the member, or in the case of ValidateMember the password is wrong.
What do you think?
My take on this...
There are three causes of failure:
The service code threw an exception, e.g. database error, logic error in your code. This is your fault.
The client code failed to use your service properly according to your documentation, e.g. it didn't set a required flag value, it failed to pass in an ID. This is the client software developer's fault.
The end user typed in something silly on screen, e.g. missing date of birth, negative salary. This is the end user's fault.
It's up to you how you choose to map actual fault contracts to each cause of failure. For example, we do this:
For causes 1 and 2, all the client code needs to know is that the service failed. We define a very simple "fatal error" fault contract that contains only a unique error ID. The full details of the error are logged on the server.
For cause 3, the end user needs to know exactly what he/she did wrong. We define a "validation errors" fault contract containing a collection of friendly error messages for the client code to display on screen.
We borrow the Microsoft EntLib class for cause 3, and use exception shielding to handle causes 1 and 2 declaratively. It makes for very simple code.
To Clarify:
We handle the three causes like this inside the service:
An unexpected exception is thrown in the service code. We catch it at the top level (actually exception shielding catches it, but the principle is the same). Log full details, then throw a FaultException<ServiceFault> to the client containing only the error ID.
We validate the input data and deliberately throw an exception. It's normally an ArgumentException, but any appropriate type would do. Once it is thrown, it is dealt with in exactly the same way as (1) because we want to make it appear the same to the client.
We validate the input data and deliberately throw an exception. This time, it's a FaultException<ValidationFault>. We configure exception shielding to pass this one through un-wrapped, so it appears on the client as FaultException<ValidationFault> not FaultException<ServiceFault>.
End result:
No catch blocks at all inside the service (nice clean code).
Client only has to catch FaultException<ValidationFault> if it wants to display messages to the user. All other exception types including FaultException<ServiceFault> are dealt with by the client's global error handler as fatal errors, since a fatal error in the service generally means a fatal error in the client as well.
It it is a common, routine failure, then throwing a fault is a mistake. The software should be written to handle routine items, like entering the wrong password. Fault processing is for exceptional failure which are not considered part of the program's normal design.
For example, if your program was written with the idea that it always has access to a database, and the database is not accessible, that's an issue where the "fix" is well outside of the limits of your software. A fault should be thrown.
Fault processing uses different logical flows through the structure of the programming language, and by using it only when you've "left" the normal processing of the programming problem, you will make your solution leverage the feature of the programming language in a way that seems more natural.
I believe it is good practice to separate error handling and fault handling. Any error case should be dealt by your program - fault handling is reserved for exceptional conditions. As a guide to the separation of the two I found it useful when considering such cases to remember that there are only three types of error (when handling data and messages) and only one type of fault.
The error types are related to different types of validation:
Message validation - you can determine from the message contents that the data is valid or invalid.
Example: content that is intended to be a date of birth - you can tell from the data whether it is valid or not.
Context validation - you can only determine that content is invalid by reference to the message
combined with the system state.
Example: a valid date of joining a company is earlier than that persons date of birth.
Lies to the system - you can only determine that a message was in error when a later message
throws up an anomaly.
Example: Valid date of birth stored and inspection of the person's birth certificate shows this to be incorrect. Correction of lies to the system generally require action outside of the system, for instance invoking legal or disciplinary remedies.
Your system MUST deal with all classes of error - though in case three this may be limited to issuing an alert.
Faults (exceptions) by contrast only have one cause - data corruption (which includes data truncation). Example: validation parameters are not passed.
Here the appropriate mechanism is fault or exception handling - basically handing off the problem to some other part of the system that is capable of dealing with it (which is why there should be an ultimate destination for unhandled faults).
In the old days we used to have a rule that exceptions were only for exceptional and unexpected things. One of the reasons you did not want to use them too much was that they "cost" alot of computing power.
But if you use exceptions you can reduce the amount of code, no need for alot of if else statements, just let the exception bubble up.
It depends on your project. The most important thing is that there is a project standard and everyone does it the same way.
My opinion is that exceptions/fault should be thrown whenever what the method is supposed to do can't be achieved. So validation logic should never raise exception except if the validation can't be made (i.e. for technical reasons) but never just because the data are not valid (in that case it will return validation codes/messages or anything helping the caller to correct the data).
Now the GetMember case is an interesting one because it's all about semantic. The name of the method suggest that a member can be retrieved by passing an id (compare to a TryGetMember method for exemple). Of course the method should not throw the same exception if the id is nowhere to be found or if the database does not respond but a wrong id passed to this method is probably the sign that something is going wrong somewhere before that call. Except if the user can directly enter a member-id from within the interface in which case a validation should occurred before calling the method.
I hear a lot about the performance issue. I just made a simple test using C# and trow/catch 1000 exceptions. The time it took is 23ms for 1K Exeptions. That's 23µ per exception. I think performance is no longer the first argument here except if you plan to raise more than 2000 exception per second in which case you will have a 5% performance down, which I can start considering.
My humble opinion...

exception message getting lost in IIOP between glassfish domains

I'm running two glassfish v2 domains containing stateless session EJBs. In a few cases, an EJB in one domain has to call one in the other.
My problem is that when the called EJB aborts with an exception, the caller does not receive the message of the exception and instead reports an internal error that is not helpful at all in diagnosing the problem. What happens seems to be this:
At the transport layer, a org.omg.CORBA.portable.ApplicationException is created,which already loses all detail information about the exception except its class.
Inside com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.TopCoordinator.get_txcontext(), the status of the transaction ass rolled back causes a org.omg.CosTransactions.Unavailable to be thrown, which gets wrapped and passed around a few times and eventually results into this error being displayed to the user:
org.omg.CORBA.INVALID_TRANSACTION: vmcid: 0x0 minor code: 0 completed: No
at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.CurrentTransaction.sendingRequest(CurrentTransaction.java:807)
at com.sun.jts.CosTransactions.SenderReceiver.sending_request(SenderReceiver.java:139)
at com.sun.jts.pi.InterceptorImpl.send_request(InterceptorImpl.java:344)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.interceptors.InterceptorInvoker.invokeClientInterceptorStartingPoint(InterceptorInvoker.java:271)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.interceptors.PIHandlerImpl.invokeClientPIStartingPoint(PIHandlerImpl.java:348)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.protocol.CorbaClientRequestDispatcherImpl.beginRequest(CorbaClientRequestDispatcherImpl.java:284)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.protocol.CorbaClientDelegateImpl.request(CorbaClientDelegateImpl.java:184)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.StubInvocationHandlerImpl.privateInvoke(StubInvocationHandlerImpl.java:186)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.StubInvocationHandlerImpl.invoke(StubInvocationHandlerImpl.java:152)
at com.sun.corba.ee.impl.presentation.rmi.bcel.BCELStubBase.invoke(BCELStubBase.java:225)
Is there anything I can do here to preserve information about the actual cause of the problem?
The cause of the problem should be available in the server log of the domains hosting the EJB that had a problem.
It sounds like getting more info back from the other end may be difficult... I do not know which issue tracker would be the right one for the info lost when the ApplicationException is created/thrown.
A total hack would be to create a set of custom exception classes in the project that has the ejb that has failed. You would make them very fine grained to cover the likely causes of the problem and provide enough detail in their name to identify the actual location of the problem, too. Yucky... but that may be the only choice until an issue gets filed and the fix is distributed.
Is there anything I can do here to
preserve information about the actual
cause of the problem?
Unfortunately, no. The ORB does not use normal object serialization for system exceptions (i.e., org.omg.CORBA.*), which means that causes are lost. As #vkraemer said, you'll need to rely on server logs.
I finally got to the bottom of this: actually, Glassfish transmits exceptions through IIOP quite correctly and everything works as it should... unless you do something idiotic like this:
try{
ejb.getFoo();
}catch (Exception e){
// try again
ejb.getFoo();
}
Yeah, it was our own damn code that swallowed the exception and tried to call a transaction-requiring EJB method within a distributed transaction that's been rolled back due to the exception.

Instantiating TransactionScope returns null

I have some VB.NET code that creates a TransactionScope instance:
LoggingUtility.LogDebug("UpdateCallTable", "SatComCallDataImporter", "About to associate call data with contracts")
Using ts = New TransactionScope()
LoggingUtility.LogDebug("UpdateCallTable", "SatComCallDataImporter", "Getting all unimported SatCom calls")
My application is throwing an exception on the call to the creation of a new TransactionScope, with "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.". The exception isn't thrown on my development machine or my test machine; only on the customers production machine, and I have no idea why. I've placed debug lines immediately before and after this line so I'm positive it is this line causing the problem.
A have used TransactionScopes throughout the application and this is the only place throwing the exception on the client machine.
"About to associate call data with contracts" gets written to the log and the next log entry is the "Object reference not set to an instance of an object".
Code works fine if I move it out of a transaction.
I've been struggling with this for 4 days now and have got no closer.
Perhaps you have an issue with MSDTC?
I'd lean more towards a coding error though, because the TransactionScope object should be initialised and non null, but it will be indicating an error.
Perhaps showing us the code might help us further?
UPDATE: I've had experience with logging engines failing to log the line before an exception, which is sometimes caused by release mode reordering, or the routine doesn't flush actively and the app crashes nastily before it can complete.
I would suggest placing a logging line directly after you using() statement to assert that the TransactionScope is not null. Given the way you have used the code, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the result of that code to return null, the constructor must throw an exception if the constructor fails, otherwise you have a non null transaction scope.
Perhaps a little more code and this test might help some more?