Author Topic: Pretty severe issue with the latest patch level (3.3.2) -- Clock doesn't update  (Read 2737 times)

shushs

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I run TD from a virtual machine, and use a laptop to display the tournament over a VNC connection. Tonight, after upgrading to the latest version, and the most recent patches, when I ran the tournament, the clock never updated. We run with 20 minute blinds. I got the 'paused' display flashing, hit the space bar, and the flashing stopped, but the clock never moved. I went to the seating chart, and the small clock in the upper left hand corner (ULC) displayed the proper time. I went back to the Tournament, and it showed the current time, but did not update yet again. I had to run my tournament by looking at the small ULC clock. I had seen this type of behavior in a previous version, somewhere in the 2.x series, but it was working fine in 3.x until today. I tried with different VNC connections, using different types of clients, and all had the same result. The Virtual Machine PC had been rebooted recently as well, due to security updates... Any ideas? Need any other information?

Stuart Murray

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Had a similar issue previously with VM's, when I was running a second version of TD within the VM for a second tournament it's screen would not update, had to click "tournament" to get the screen to update.  My theory is it's the amount of resources given to the VM was not sufficient to allow TD to run inside the VM (Bear in mind that the tournament screen is updating every second - that's a considerable amount of resources).  In reality you would indeed need a considerably powerful system in order to give the VM the resources it needs to run.  My problem was solved by Corey giving me the concurrent running option, haven't had any issues with VNC running multiple tournaments so I would point the finger squarely at your Virtual Box.  You could try a the most simple layouts (ie the ones that don't need much refresh, which will give the VM back enough resources to keep your screen up to date.
Stuart Murray

shushs

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Thanks Stuart. I will certainly look into the VM being the issue. I did not think that TD would bog down (yes, I know it is virtual, so YMMV) an 3GHz w/ 3GB RAM vm. This is VMWare ESX 5 and it is the only Windows machine running there. The rest are small Linux boxes that do DNS, and local development work only, so they are not typically taxed during tournaments (unless I get busted early). I will fiddle with it and see what I can get to happen. Maybe setting some 'reservation' memory/CPU would be a good start.

Thanks again.

Corey Cooper

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Thanks for the insight, Stuart.  I've run the TD in many virtual machines (VMWare) and haven't run into this.  But I'm usually just testing for discrepancies between different versions of IE and different versions of Windows.

The TD application itself shouldn't be very taxing, but it does cause the screen to be updated at least every second, so IE can sometimes get bogged down re-rendering.  If have seen IE unable to update the screen every second on underpowered PCs (sometimes not updating the screen for 5 to 10 seconds), but I've never seen it stop completely.  Was it just the main clock, or were other areas of the screen "stuck" too?  (Time of day, next break, anything that should update at the same rate as the clock.)

shushs

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Just the main clock, but I will say, the functions keys were also not behaving "normally". F2 brought up the seating chart, and then the tournament, and then nothing. Once the seating chart was only 2 players long and the screen was not completely visible. It truly was odd. The small clock in the upper left hand side did continue to update correctly.

Corey Cooper

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Sounds like there might have been more going on.  In a situation like this, I would have saved the tournament, exited the TD, restarted the TD, loaded the tournament and then seen how it behaves.  If it didn't improve, I'd be inclined to repeat with a reboot of Windows in there as well.  May or may not have helped, but you never know.

Stuart Murray

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My experience was that most screens couldn't refresh or display.  I remember specifically not being able to display the seating chart on the VM tournament, eventually I managed to get it displayed by clicking tournament > seating chart over and over until I finally got it to display.  I think my issue was exclusively the VM as I did give it half the resources of the PC, however the half that was for the OS managed TD fine on tournament 1.
Stuart Murray

shushs

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Well, there is a strong chance that it is the VM. It is an old Win XP image, and as I step through troubleshooting, I am finding some issues with the datastore. I have increased the RAM and Processor count, but sadly, it is a 32bit build, so it really _may_ not help. I am in the process of building a new machine, I will do my best to reply back and let you know what I find. Thank you for indulging my issue and providing feedback.