Ionic.Zip (DotNetZip) hangs with in save method with IO.MemoryStream - vb.net

I'll try to create an zip file with the DotNetZip-Libary with 106 Images (675MB) with the following code:
Public Function GetZip() As Byte()
Dim zip As New Ionic.Zip.ZipFile(String.Format("{0}.zip", Me.GallerySystemName))
AddHandler zip.SaveProgress, AddressOf SaveProgress
For Each img In Me.Images
zip.AddFile(img.OriginalFile.FullName, "")
Next
Dim bytZip As Byte()
Using ms As New MemoryStream
zip.Save(ms)
bytZip = ms.ToArray
End Using
Return bytZip
End Function
When I run this code, the execution stops usally at image 40 (sometimes earlier) without any exeption. Nothing happens. I tried to save the zip directly to a file. It works.
Any ideas?
Jan

SET the zip object property ParallelDeflateThreshold to -1 just before saving the zip file
zip.ParallelDeflateThreshold = -1
REF: http://forums.codeguru.com/showthread.php?534177-Issue-with-DotNetZip-ionic.zip-class-hanging-on-save

It's been almost 2 years since your question, so I doubt this will help but I just encountered the same problem in v1.9.1.8.
I worked around it by increasing the BufferSize and CodecBufferSize ZipFile properties to 1MB each.
I can't download the DotNetZip source because of filters at work but here is a very-likely-related comment from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/releases/view/68268
There is a pretty major bug in the code. I am working to figure it out. Another chap logged it before me: Deadlock in ParallelDeflateOutputStream.EmitPendingBuffers The zip hangs. End-of-day I will have to rip this code out and start over with a new library. I need to call my last job and give them a head's up b/c I used this library at my last job. They will likely have to rip the code out too.
by jnarkiewicz on May 30 at 6:31 PM
So if this is indeed the problem, increasing the size of those buffers just lowers the likelihood of the deadlock occurring and is not an ideal solution.

Related

Will Putting This Onto A background Worker Stop This Issue

I have been trying to fix this for a number of days now without any success. I know I have created another post related to this issue but not sure if I should have continued with the other post rather than creating a new one as I am still quite new to how SO works so apologies if I have gone about this the wrong way.
Objective
Read a text file from disk, output the contents to a Textbox so I can then extract the last 3 lines from it. This is the only way I can think of doing this.
The text file is continuously been updated by another running program but I can still read it even though it is in use but cannot write to it.
I am probing this file through a Timer which ticks every 1 second in order to get the latest information.
Now to the issue...
I have noticed that after some time my app becomes sluggish which is noticeable when I try to move it across the screen or resize it and the CPU usage starts to creep up to over 33%
My Thought Process
As this reading the file is a continuous one, I was thinking that I could move it onto a BackgroundWorker which from my understanding would put it on a different thread and take some load off the main GUI.
Am I barking up the wrong tree on this one?
I am reaching out to more advanced users before I start to get all the text books out on learning how to use the BackgroundWorker.
Here is the code I am using to Read the txt file and output it to a text Box. I have not included the code for extracting the last 3 lines because I don't think that part is causing the issue.
I think the issue is because I am constantly probing the source files every second with a timer but not 100% sure to be honest.
Dim strLogFilePath As String
strLogFilePath = "C:\DSD\data.txt"
Dim LogFileStream As FileStream
Dim LogFileReader As StreamReader
'Open file for reading
LogFileStream = New FileStream(strLogFilePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)
LogFileReader = New StreamReader(LogFileStream)
'populate text box with the contents of the txt file
Dim strRowText As String
strRowText = LogFileReader.ReadToEnd()
TextBox1.text = strRowText
'Clean Up
LogFileReader.Close()
LogFileStream.Close()
LogFileReader.Dispose()
LogFileStream.Dispose()
Firstly, you should use the Using keyword instead of manually disposing objects, because that way you are guaranteed that the object will get disposed, even if an unexpected exception occurs, for example:
' You can initialize variables in one line
Dim strLogFilePath As String = "C:\DSD\data.txt"
Using LogFileStream As New FileStream(strLogFilePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)
' Everything goes in here
End Using
You don't need the reader for my solution. The reading will be done manually.
Next, you need to read the last n lines (in your case, 3) of the stream. Reading the entire file when you're only interested in a few lines at the end is inefficient. Instead, you can start reading from the end until you've reached three (or any number of) line seprators (based on this answer):
Function ReadLastLines(
NumberOfLines As Integer, Encoding As System.Text.Encoding, FS As FileStream,
Optional LineSeparator As String = vbCrLf
) As String
Dim NewLineSize As Integer = Encoding.GetByteCount(LineSeparator)
Dim NewLineCount As Integer = 0
Dim EndPosition As Long = Convert.ToInt64(FS.Length / NewLineSize)
Dim NewLineBytes As Byte() = Encoding.GetBytes(LineSeparator)
Dim Buffer As Byte() = Encoding.GetBytes(LineSeparator)
For Position As Long = NewLineSize To EndPosition Step NewLineSize
FS.Seek(-Position, SeekOrigin.End)
FS.Read(Buffer, 0, Buffer.Length)
If Encoding.GetString(Buffer) = LineSeparator Then
NewLineCount += 1
If NewLineCount = NumberOfLines Then
Dim ReturnBuffer(CInt(FS.Length - FS.Position)) As Byte
FS.Read(ReturnBuffer, 0, ReturnBuffer.Length)
Return Encoding.GetString(ReturnBuffer)
End If
End If
Next
' Handle case where number of lines in file is less than NumberOfLines
FS.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
Buffer = New Byte(CInt(FS.Length)) {}
FS.Read(Buffer, 0, Buffer.Length)
Return Encoding.GetString(Buffer)
End Function
Usage:
Using LogFileStream As New FileStream(strLogFilePath, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)
' Depending on system, you may need to supply an argument for the LineSeparator param
Dim LastThreeLines As String = ReadLastLines(3, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, LogFileStream)
' Do something with the last three lines
MsgBox(LastThreeLines)
End Using
Note that I haven't tested this code, and I'm sure it can be improved. It may also not work for all encodings, but it sounds like it should be better than your current solution, and that it will work in your situation.
Edit: Also, to answer your question, IO operations should usually be performed asynchronously to avoid blocking the UI. You can do this using tasks or a BackgroundWorker. It probably won't make it faster, but it will make your application more responsive. It's best to indicate that something is loading before the task begins.
If you know when your file is being written to, you can set a flag to start reading, and then unset it when the last lines have been read. If it hasn't changed, there's no reason to keep reading it over and over.

Read of text file never being released from memory

I'm using .NET Framework 4.6.2 (VB) for a Windows Service. I'm using NLog to write a log file without issue. I'm now adding a log viewer utility which will show the last 100 lines of the log file. I've used various methods to read the file but can't seem to escape the reality that I eventually need to iterate through the entire file to get to the lines that I need. That's not a problem.
Where I'm having an issue is that after I've finished reading the file it NEVER seems to get released from memory. When I start my application, it's using approximately 16MB of memory. After the read (of an at most 10MB file) it's using around 38.5MB. Even doing things like clearing the List(Of String) or a forced Garbage Collection is never fully releasing the memory.
I'm using probably the simplest version of a read:
Dim LogEntries As List(Of String) = System.IO.File.ReadLines(LogFile).ToList()
LogEntries.Clear()
I am performing other tasks between the ReadLines and LogEntries.Clear() steps, but the issue is present even if I use only the lines shown above.
I would expect that on clearing the LogEntries list would return the memory usage to approximately 16MB, but the lowest I've been able to get it (after a GC.Collect()) is about 22MB. Can anyone explain this to me?
The whole point of calling ReadLines is that it doesn't read every line at the same time. If you then call ToList on the result then you force it to wait until all lines are read. That's silly. If you want the last 100 lines then you have no choice but to read the whole lot but there's no point keeping it all.
Dim lines = File.ReadAllLines(filePath)
lines = lines.Skip(lines.Length - 100).ToArray()
The first line reads the entire file into a String array and then the second line creates a second array containing just the last 100 elements and discards the first array.
Another option that would reduce memory consumption at the expense of performance would be this:
Dim lines As New List(Of String)
Using reader As New StreamReader(filePath)
Do Until reader.EndOfStream
lines.Add(reader.ReadLine())
If lines.Count > 100 Then
lines.RemoveAt(0)
End If
Loop
End Using

VB.NET (2013) - Check string against huge file

I have a text file that is 125Mb in size, it contains 2.2 million records. I have another text file which doesn't match the original but I need to find out where it differs. Normally, with a smaller file I would read each line and process it in some way, or read the whole file into a string and do likewise, however the two files are too big for that and so I would like to create something to achieve my goal. Here's what I currently have.. excuse the mess of it.
Private Sub refUpdateBtn_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles refUpdateBtn.Click
Dim refOrig As String = refOriginalText.Text 'Original Reference File
Dim refLatest As String = refLatestText.Text 'Latest Reference
Dim srOriginal As StreamReader = New StreamReader(refOrig) 'start stream of original file
Dim srLatest As StreamReader = New StreamReader(refLatest) 'start stream of latest file
Dim recOrig, recLatest, baseDIR, parentDIR, recOutFile As String
baseDIR = vb.Left(refOrig, InStrRev(refOrig, ".ref") - 1) 'find parent folder
parentDIR = Path.GetDirectoryName(baseDIR) & "\"
recOutFile = parentDIR & "Updated.ref"
Me.Text = "Processing Reference File..." 'update the application
Update()
If Not File.Exists(recOutFile) Then
FileOpen(55, recOutFile, OpenMode.Append)
FileClose(55)
End If
Dim x As Integer = 0
Do While srLatest.Peek() > -1
Application.DoEvents()
recLatest = srLatest.ReadLine
recOrig = srOriginal.ReadLine ' check the original reference file
Do
If Not recLatest.Equals(recOrig) Then
recOrig = srOriginal.ReadLine
Else
FileOpen(55, recOutFile, OpenMode.Append)
Print(55, recLatest & Environment.NewLine)
FileClose(55)
x += 1
count.Text = "Record No: " & x
count.Refresh()
srOriginal.BaseStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin)
GoTo 1
End If
Loop
1:
Loop
srLatest.Close()
srOriginal.Close()
FileClose(55)
End Sub
It's got poor programming and scary loops, but that's because I'm not a professional coder, just a guy trying to make his life easier.
Currently, this uses a form to insert the original file and the latest file and outputs each line that matches into a new file. This is less than perfect, but I don't know how to cope with the large file sizes as streamreader.readtoend crashes the program. I also don't need the output to be a copy of the latest input, but I don't know how to only output the records it doesn't find. Here's a sample of the records each file has:
doc:ARCHIVE.346CCBD3B06711E0B40E00163505A2EF
doc:ARCHIVE.346CE683B29811E0A06200163505A2EF
doc:ARCHIVE.346CEB15A91711E09E8900163505A2EF
doc:ARCHIVE.346CEC6AAA6411E0BEBB00163505A2EF
The program I have currently works... to a fashion, however I know there are better ways of doing it and I'm sure much better ways of using the CPU and memory, but I don't know this level of programming. All I would like is for you to take a look and offer your best answers to all or some of the code. Tell me what you think will make it better, what will help with one line, or all of it. I have no time limit on this because the code works, albeit slowly, I would just like someone to tell me where my code could be better and what I could do to get round the huge file sizes.
Your code is slow because it is doing a lot of file IO. You're on the right track by reading one line at a time, but this can be improved.
Firstly, I've created some test files based off the data that you provided. Those files contain three million lines and are about 130 MB in size (2.2 million records was less than 100 MB so I've increased the number of lines to get to the file size that you state).
Reading the entire file into a single string uses up about 600 MB of memory. Do this with two files (which I assume you were doing) and you have over 1GB of memory used, which may have been causing the crash (you don't say what error was shown, if any, when the crash occurred, so I can only assume that it was an OutOfMemoryException).
Here's a few tips before I go through your code:
Use Using Blocks
This won't help with performance, but it does make your code cleaner and easier to read.
Whenever you're dealing with a file (or anything that implements the IDisposable interface), it's always a good idea to use a Using statement. This will automatically dispose of the file (which closes the file), even if an error happens.
Don't use FileOpen
The FileOpen method is outdated (and even stated as being slow in its documentation). There are better alternatives that you are already (almost) using: StreamWriter (the cousin of StreamReader).
Opening and closing a file two million times (like you are doing inside your loop) won't be fast. This can be improved by opening the file once outside the loop.
DoEvents() is evil!
DoEvents is a legacy method from back in the VB6 days, and it's something that you really want to avoid, especially when you're calling it two million times in a loop!
The alternative is to perform all of your file processing on a separate thread so that your UI is still responsive.
Using a separate thread here is probably overkill, and there are a number of intricacies that you need to be aware of, so I have not used a separate thread in the code below.
So let's look at each part of your code and see what we can improve.
Creating the output file
You're almost right here, but you're doing some things that you don't need to do. GetDirectoryName works with file names, so there's no need to remove the extension from the original file name first. You can also use the Path.Combine method to combine a directory and file name.
recOutFile = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(refOrig), "Updated.ref")
Reading the files
Since you're looping through each line in the "latest" file and finding a match in the "original" file, you can continue to read one line at a time from the "latest" file.
But instead of reading a line at a time from the "original" file, then seeking back to the start when you find a match, you will be better off reading all of those lines into memory.
Now, instead of reading the entire file into memory (which took up 600 MB as I mentioned earlier), you can read each line of the file into an array. This will use up less memory, and is quite easy to do thanks to the File class.
originalLines = File.ReadAllLines(refOrig)
This reads all of the lines from the file and returns a String array. Searching through this array for matches will be slow, so instead of reading into an array, we can read into a HashSet(Of String). This will use up a bit more memory, but it will be much faster to seach through.
originalLines = New HashSet(Of String)(File.ReadAllLines(refOrig))
Searching for matches
Since we now have all of the lines from the "original" line in an array or HashSet, searching for a line is very easy.
originalLines.Contains(recLatest)
Putting it all together
So let's put all of this together:
Private Sub refUpdateBtn_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs)
Dim refOrig As String
Dim refLatest As String
Dim recOutFile As String
Dim originalLines As HashSet(Of String)
refOrig = refOriginalText.Text 'Original Reference File
refLatest = refLatestText.Text 'Latest Reference
recOutFile = Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(refOrig), "Updated.ref")
Me.Text = "Processing Reference File..." 'update the application
Update()
originalLines = New HashSet(Of String)(File.ReadAllLines(refOrig))
Using latest As New StreamReader(refLatest),
updated As New StreamWriter(recOutFile, True)
Do
Dim line As String
line = latest.ReadLine()
' ReadLine returns Nothing when it reaches the end of the file.
If line Is Nothing Then
Exit Do
End If
If originalLines.Contains(line) Then
updated.WriteLine(line)
End If
Loop
End Using
End Sub
This uses around 400 MB of memory and takes about 4 seconds to run.

Efficient use of (or alternative to) System.IO.MemoryStream

I have the following code which I am using to populate a ImageList from a SQLite database with images stored as blobs.
Public Sub populateImagesStyles()
ShoeImages1.Images.Clear()
StyleImagesLView.Items.Clear()
Dim s As SQLiteDataReader
Dim rcount As Integer = 0
dbLocalQuery = New SQLiteCommand("SELECT id, image FROM tblImages", dbLocal)
s = dbLocalQuery.ExecuteReader()
While s.Read()
rcount += 1
ShoeImages1.Images.Add(CStr(s("id")), byte2img(s("image")))
StyleImagesLView.Items.Add(CStr(s("id")), CStr(s("id")))
End While
s.Close()
Here is the byte2img function...
Public Function byte2img(ByVal imgByte As Byte()) As Image
Dim imgMemoryStream As System.IO.MemoryStream = New System.IO.MemoryStream(imgByte)
byte2img = Drawing.Image.FromStream(imgMemoryStream)
End Function
The database contains over 250 images and this process is completed twice on load to populate two different ImageList, because I need the images displayed at two different sizes.
When the process runs on loading the form, it causes the process to consume between 800MB and 1GB of system memory, unless I manually run the process again from an form control, which seems to trigger garbage collection.
Stepping through the loading process, it is clear that it is the byte2img process that is causing the memory usage to escalate - what is the best way to mitigate this?
Also, if anyone can think of a more efficient process to execute this, i'm all ears. The images have to be stored in the database file because I need to be able to just package the .db file and send it to a remote location at a moments notice, so I can't mess with folders with images.
All help appreciated.
You are creating a lot of memory streams without disposing of them. Try this:
Public Function byte2img(ByVal imgByte As Byte()) As Image
Dim img As Image
Try
Using ms As New MemoryStream(imgbyte)
img = Drawing.Image.FromStream(ms)
End Using ' auto dispose of the MS
Catch ex As Exception
' report possibly bad/missing imgByte()
' resulting in an error in either place
End Try
Return img
End Function
An imprecise way to detect this kind of thing is to watch the HANDLES count in TaskManager.
Ok, I've found a solution/workaround that seems to work - call the PopulateImageStyles sub when a user visits the specific TabPage the ImageList resides on.
For some arbitrary reason, when run this way (as above, when called on the form), the process never proceeds to consume more than 50-60 MB of working memory.
I'll add a Background Worker so that the process can execute without hanging the form.

Out of memory when opening images using Stream

I hope you can help with what is probably a naive use of Streams in VB.net.
I have a program that batch processes images and am running out of memory making repeated use (in a loop) of the following:
Using str As Stream = File.OpenRead(file_stem + CStr(file_number) + "." + file_extension)
temp_img = Image.FromStream(str)
str.Close()
End Using
PictureBox1.Image = temp_img
bm = PictureBox1.Image.Clone
temp_img is globally declared Dim temp_img As Image. bm is declared in the same Sub routine as the loop Dim bm As Bitmap.
As the program runs I can see in Task Manager the memory usage rising and then it crashes with an out of memory error. It's as if each time I am using the Stream it is keeping the memory used. What am I doing wrong here?
EDIT:
This thread appears to have gone cold now, but I thought I would share my "work around" for this. It would seem that this is a VB.net bug as the way I have fixed it is to add a MsgBox which is shown only one, immediately prior to the first call to the subroutine that processes sets of 60 images. I ran a single job that processed 96 sets of 60 images and the memory usage didn't rise above about 45MB. The important thing that makes me think it is a bug is that I only show the MsgBox before the first set of 60 and all are run in series. Showing an MsgBox shouldn't fix anything in itself anyway!