WOL Ex2.05 stops pinging the hosts after some time

[Petr]

Hello, I have discovered a bug in version 2.05.

I use WOL Ex 2 on Windows XP SP3 and I have 9 hosts configured.

When I start WOL Ex 2, it starts pinging the hosts every 5 seconds as configured but after some time it stops pinging them (verified by Wireshark). IIRC version 2.00 worked fine.

I'm also surprised that the WOL Ex 2 application takes 76 MB of memory shortly after the start - this number is displayed in the Task Manager. Is it correct?

And one small correction - Wake On Lan EX.txt file contains broken link
Forum : http://www.bootblock.co.uk/forum
instead of http://forum.bootblock.co.uk

Regards,

Petr

[BootBlock]

Hi Petr,

When I start WOL Ex 2, it starts pinging the hosts every 5 seconds as configured but after some time it stops pinging them (verified by Wireshark). IIRC version 2.00 worked fine.

Could you give a rough guess to how long it works before it stops pinging? v2.02 introduced a much faster pinging method as the previous versions were unbearably slow, so it's no-doubt related to that. I'll be leaving WoLEX running within the IDE to see if I can spot the problem. I'm using Windows 7 (previously Vista), so I'm wondering if it's a WinXP thing relating to its sockets.

I'm also surprised that the WOL Ex 2 application takes 76 MB of memory shortly after the start - this number is displayed in the Task Manager. Is it correct?

It tends to vary across different set-ups (18MB on mine, for example), but that is pretty much correct. .NET pre-allocates more memory than it requires so the application can "grow" into it; if it finds that the system requires that memory for something else, it'll free it and show the true memory usage of the application.

Minimising the application to the system tray may reduce that figure, which might more explain the large difference between our memory usages.

And one small correction - Wake On Lan EX.txt file contains broken link

Oops. Fixed, and I've added a redirect to the server as I'm pretty sure I've used that link else-where in the past.

[Petr]

I tried it now and WOL Ex 2.05 stopped after 14 pings the first time, after 9 pings the second time and after 31 pings the third time. It means few minutes.

Regards,

Petr

[BootBlock]

Thanks for the reply.

I've left it running for 2 hours, which equates to 1,440 pings (for two entries, so 2,880 separate pings in total), and it still seems to work. I'm going to try and test in Windows XP to see if it happens there (depending on how good this Windows XP Mode in Win7 actually is!).

[Petr]

I tried it on another XP SP3 PC now and it worked for about 3500 seconds and then pings stopped too.

Regrads,

Petr

[Petr]

Now I have tried 2.06 and no change.

On the third system with WinXP SP3 system WOL Ex 2.06 stopped after few minues again.

Then I tried to reduce the number of the Address Book entries to one. And - the pinging continues now for more than one hour.

On the fourth system with Win7 x64 WOL Ex 2.06 works fine even with 10 entries several hours.

So it seems the problem is related to WinXP and more (10) Address Book entries.

Should I do any more diagnostics?

BTW, why the WOL Ex application listens on TCP port 1415?

Regards,

Petr

[souden]

Hello

I have the same problem.

Sometimes the ping runs for 3600 seconds.
Then stop/start WoLEX, it runs for 400 seconds
Stop/start WoLEX, it runs for 500 seconds

It is really intermittent.

I have XP sp 3 with all latest updates and all .NET Framework upto 3.5 sp1

Is there any way to debug this?

Regards, Simon

[BootBlock]

Sorry about not replying to the thread; the posting in this forum has reduced considerably over the last few years to the point where I don't check it often any more because of it.

Regarding the WinXP pinging problem, it's been extremely hard to reproduce, let alone debug.

Assuming it is due to the socket throttling, can anyone that's experiencing this change the PingAddressBookEntriesThreads setting to something much lower, like 2 or 3. I've changed the default so it's 3 on WinXP just in-case.

BTW, why the WOL Ex application listens on TCP port 1415?

There's no code contained within WoLEX that does any listening, but I've just checked it (with Comodo Firewall's port monitor... thing) and you're right. The port you're seeing appears to be a random local port (mine's in the 29xx range within this Windows session), but I can't work out why it's happening.

I'm going to keep digging to see if I can find if .NET is doing some pointless diagnostic thing in the background. In the meantime, WoLEX v2.07 will be released within the hour of this post. Change log is here.

[Petr]

I have tried 2.06 with PingAddressBookEntriesThreads set to 2 and 9 address book entries now and the pinging stopped after just 5 pings.

But decreasing PingAddressBookEntriesThreads to 1 helped! It worked for several hours.

[Petr]

No luck, it stopped after 10 hours too.