Cumulus Support

Hi,
I've been using Cumulus 1.8.7 for a few weeks now, and have found it to be about the most flexible and user-friendly weather software I've tried. Good work! Today I upgraded to v 1.8.8 b874 and the first thing I notice is the manual web update time seems to be quite a bit longer (about 35 seconds as opposed to 3-5 seconds for 1.8.7). Is this normal or have I got something wrong? Everything seems to work ok, so I'm not really fussed about it and, in any case, I'm using MarkB's ajax framework to do most of the page updating.
Cheers.
Graeme

I moved the web updating into a separate (background) thread to avoid it freezing the UI. I'm afraid this will inevitably have slowed it down, but I'm quite surprised that it's made such a big difference to the manual update. It doesn't seem to have made a huge difference to my automatic updates (which were never very fast anyway). I've just timed mine, and both manual and automatic updates take about 90 seconds. I think it used to take around 60-70 seconds, but I don't really take much notice. I know that some people do get very fast upload speeds, even with 1.8.8, so I'd assume my lack of speed was down to my connection.

I hadn't noticed any delay in the automatic updates, and I only use manual updating to speed up viewing of a modified page layout, as the whole site is still considered a work in progress. Having said that, I used Virtual Weather Station prior to Cumulus and that was SSLLOOWW to update, keeping in mind the web-server sits on the bench next to my workstation.

Cheers,
Graeme.

FTP is inherently a slow protocol anyway, particularly for uploads of a number of small files. Each transfer requires a new connection to be established, which probably accounts for the slowness in my case. If your automatic updates are quicker than your manual ones, the difference may well be down to the updating of the progress window - it requires the main thread to be interrupted to do the updates.

Steve, over the past days, I had Cumulus 1 crashes on two different computers.

I have attached the bug report that was created when Cumulus encountered the problem on my 'development' computer.

Thanks, Ray. Tricky one, as there's no Cumulus code on the stack. But it does look as though you may have been closing Cumulus down at the time? I know it does sometimes throw an error on close down, but that doesn't seem to cause any other problems.

steve wrote:Thanks, Ray.

NO! Thank you Steve!

steve wrote:Tricky one, as there's no Cumulus code on the stack. But it does look as though you may have been closing Cumulus down at the time? I know it does sometimes throw an error on close down, but that doesn't seem to cause any other problems.

The error report I sent you was produced before I had time to close Cumulus - I was not even at my computer when the error message appeared on the screen. When I saw that there was an error somewhere, I saved the report file and the closed Cumulus...

But I have had some similar error messages on the computer that manage the weather programs, except I could not be bothered to look into the problem.

To make sure that Cumulus was (or was not) causing the problem, I have reinstalled Cumulus on another computer. This time, there was not error message displayed on the screen but Cumulus had stopped and had frozen the operation of another program. Once the computer had been booted up, I updated Cumulus to the latest release. I have deactivated most of the other programs running on that computer except the program for which that computer has been dedicated for/to, running the Cyber Genie Phone Manager.

Cumulus has been running for a couple of hours. Will keep you posted.

gemini06720 wrote:The error report I sent you was produced before I had time to close Cumulus

Something else must have told Cumulus to close. Do you have 'close on suspend' set in the station options?

steve wrote:

gemini06720 wrote:The error report I sent you was produced before I had time to close Cumulus

Something else must have told Cumulus to close. Do you have 'close on suspend' set in the station options?

No! I do not use either 'suspend' or 'hibernation' on my 'development' computer and have not activated that option inside Cumulus - the 'hibernate' and 'suspend' options are (have been) deactivated on ALL my computers as those options have created problems under all version of Windows prior to 7.

The Cumulus I have installed a few days ago on my 'phone management' computer is still running properly (no error so far) - I have not restarted the Cumulus on my 'development' computer as I have been doing some template modifications.

Could you zip up your diags files (assuming the ones for the times of the crashes are still there) and let me have them, please?

steve wrote:Could you zip up your diags files (assuming the ones for the times of the crashes are still there) and let me have them, please?

Sorry Steve, cannot do! Whatever happened on that day and at that time has been overwritten since then...

The Cumulus running on my 'phone management' computer has bee doing well - no error so far.

Ok, no problem, perhaps we can look at it if/when it happens again.

steve wrote:Ok, no problem, perhaps we can look at it if/when it happens again.

That I can surely do ... I just have to leave myself a note or a 'postIt"...