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From: Guenther Fischer on 27 Jan 2010 00:25
In article <2010012712174816807-gorril(a)mailcom>, Gorril
<gorril(a)mail.com> wrote:

> On 2010-01-26 16:29:27 +1000, Ed Kual <edkual(a)gmail.com> said:
>
> > I am a new immigrant to Mac after using windows for many years. On windows
> > I use Xnews as my binary news reader/downloader which was small and easy to
> > use. On Mac I have found Unison nice and easy to use except that it freezes
> > quite frequently (rotatinf color wheel) and I need to force quit it. This
> > happens with versions 1.8, 2, and 2.3 under SL. I was wondering if others
> > have experienced the same problem and how it can be solved.
> >
> > Thanks
>
> Unison's developers simply don't understand multi threaded programming.
> I doubt that this problem is fixable without a complete rewrite of
> the application.

Sorry - Unison is running perfect here. There is no reason here, to
doubt Unison programmers ability multi threaded programming.
Sounds more like a Mac OS X problem, may be fonts or cache problems.
From: Ed Kual on 27 Jan 2010 00:42
Guenther Fischer <never(a)spam.invalid> wrote in
news:270120100625454811%never(a)spam.invalid:

> In article <2010012712174816807-gorril(a)mailcom>, Gorril
> <gorril(a)mail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-26 16:29:27 +1000, Ed Kual <edkual(a)gmail.com> said:
>>
>> > I am a new immigrant to Mac after using windows for many years. On
>> > windows I use Xnews as my binary news reader/downloader which was
>> > small and easy to use. On Mac I have found Unison nice and easy to
>> > use except that it freezes quite frequently (rotatinf color wheel)
>> > and I need to force quit it. This happens with versions 1.8, 2, and
>> > 2.3 under SL. I was wondering if others have experienced the same
>> > problem and how it can be solved.
>> >
>> > Thanks
>>
>> Unison's developers simply don't understand multi threaded
>> programming.
>> I doubt that this problem is fixable without a complete rewrite of
>> the application.
>
> Sorry - Unison is running perfect here. There is no reason here, to
> doubt Unison programmers ability multi threaded programming.
> Sounds more like a Mac OS X problem, may be fonts or cache problems.
>


Any idea how this font or cash problem can be solved?

Thanks
From: Guenther Fischer on 27 Jan 2010 01:18
In article <Xns9D0D746F744edkual(a)209.197.12.12>, Ed Kual
<edkual(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Guenther Fischer <never(a)spam.invalid> wrote in
> news:270120100625454811%never(a)spam.invalid:
>
> > In article <2010012712174816807-gorril(a)mailcom>, Gorril
> > <gorril(a)mail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> On 2010-01-26 16:29:27 +1000, Ed Kual <edkual(a)gmail.com> said:
> >>
> >> > I am a new immigrant to Mac after using windows for many years. On
> >> > windows I use Xnews as my binary news reader/downloader which was
> >> > small and easy to use. On Mac I have found Unison nice and easy to
> >> > use except that it freezes quite frequently (rotatinf color wheel)
> >> > and I need to force quit it. This happens with versions 1.8, 2, and
> >> > 2.3 under SL. I was wondering if others have experienced the same
> >> > problem and how it can be solved.
> >> >
> >> > Thanks
> >>
> >> Unison's developers simply don't understand multi threaded
> >> programming.
> >> I doubt that this problem is fixable without a complete rewrite of
> >> the application.
> >
> > Sorry - Unison is running perfect here. There is no reason here, to
> > doubt Unison programmers ability multi threaded programming.
> > Sounds more like a Mac OS X problem, may be fonts or cache problems.
> >
>
>
> Any idea how this font or cash problem can be solved?
>
> Thanks

Fonts with Mac standard tools (FontBook in engl.?) or Fontdoctor.
Cache problems: Onyx, Tinkertool system, MacPilot, Snow Leopard Cache
Cleaner, ... many more.
Don�t forget to reboot after applying these tools.
From: Gorril on 27 Jan 2010 09:04
On 2010-01-27 15:25:45 +1000, Guenther Fischer <never(a)spam.invalid> said:

> In article <2010012712174816807-gorril(a)mailcom>, Gorril
> <gorril(a)mail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2010-01-26 16:29:27 +1000, Ed Kual <edkual(a)gmail.com> said:
>>
>>> I am a new immigrant to Mac after using windows for many years. On windows
>>> I use Xnews as my binary news reader/downloader which was small and easy to
>>> use. On Mac I have found Unison nice and easy to use except that it freezes
>>> quite frequently (rotatinf color wheel) and I need to force quit it. This
>>> happens with versions 1.8, 2, and 2.3 under SL. I was wondering if others
>>> have experienced the same problem and how it can be solved.
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>
>> Unison's developers simply don't understand multi threaded programming.
>> I doubt that this problem is fixable without a complete rewrite of
>> the application.
>
> Sorry - Unison is running perfect here. There is no reason here, to
> doubt Unison programmers ability multi threaded programming.
> Sounds more like a Mac OS X problem, may be fonts or cache problems.

Unison could very well be running 'perfect here' for you, but the fact
remains that Unison's developers fucked up badly.

A very common thing is for Unison to spin a beachball cursor for an
indeterminate amount of time immediately after the application is
launched. How long the beachball spins for depends on how many groups
you subscribe to and the size of the retention cache on your disk. For
me it is in the order of 30 seconds before the beachball goes away and
Unison's windows become responsive. It appears for all intents and
purposes that the application has hung.

As a software engineer I can only shake my head in wonder. Unison is
apparently doing blocking operations in the application's run loop
thread. It should of course create a worker thread so that the
application is reponsive at all times regardless of whether it is
finished loading headers and updating the local retention cache.

Many users have complained about the 'beachball of death' behaviour of
Unison. Just search for "Unison +beachball +hang" or "Unison +crash"
on Google.

It gets worse. For this you will need to find some busy binary image
groups. In displaying a binary image group Unison renders a list of
place holder icons. It is now that the fun begins. If you click the
"plus" sign overlay icon on the place holder image, Unison will
download the image and display it as a thumbnail. All well and good so
far except that woe betide you if you don't wait for the image to be
downloaded into the icon thumnail before requesting to download the
next one. There is a good chance that Unison will crash. If it didn't
you were lucky, it will crash soon.

It seems in this instance that Unison is creating a separate download
thread, but it doesn't seem to work properly when there are multiple
concurrent operations. Who knows what it is doing wrong. It is my
guess that shared memory access is not being managed properly between
threads,

I use Unison because the UI is good. It is a shame about the quality of
the code under the hood. Since it is a long standing problem one must
wonder why it hasn't been fixed.






From: johnny bobby bee on 27 Jan 2010 11:47
Gorril took to the world wide interwebs to proclaim:
> I use Unison because the UI is good. It is a shame about the quality of
> the code under the hood. Since it is a long standing problem one must
> wonder why it hasn't been fixed.

Hasn't development on Unison stopped long ago?
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