any progress on grey screen in OS4.2/OW 3?

[Piers Uso Walter]

You wrote:
> Author:	"Timothy J. Wood" <tjw at omnigroup.com>
> Date:	Sat, 12 Dec 1998 14:33:34 -0800 (PST)
> ID:	<199812122232.OAA09346 at ignem.omnigroup.com>
> 
> > As always, if you can come up with anything that is fairly
> > reproducible, please save off the HTML and send it in a mail
> > message to omniweb3 at omnigroup.com.
> 
> Well it seems (ie this is an entirely unprovable theory) that it happens  
> more often (though not exclusively) on pages with dynamic content (ie
> search engine results, etc).
> 
> But none of them happen consistently

Without being able to support my theory with hard facts, I'm pretty certain that this is a timing-related problem.

Sometimes I see the grey frame and think to myself "Oh no, not this again" when it suddenly disappears after a fraction of a second, being replaced by the real content after all.

To me, the grey frame of death seems related to the similar problem of OmniWeb sometimes stopping to update the contents of one frame view. In this case, the existing frame remains displayed even if you click on a link that should update the frame. OmniWeb seems to load the page but never displays it. Othe than the fact that you still see the old frame contents, this problem behaves exactly like the grey frame of death.

Both problems seem to pertain only to the frame they show up in, other frames still work perfectly. Opening the same URL in a different window (e.g. by double clicking the URL arrow) also typically works (if it doesn't crash OmniWeb). 

Here's an example of some frame related issues I noticed:

[Hier war ursprünglich eine Anlage beigefügt]

This page is divided into two frames (top and bottom). The lower frame has just experienced the grey screen of death problem.

The rightmost link replaces the top frame (which works). The two middle links try to replace the contents of the bottom frame (which does not work), the leftmost link replaces the whole page (both frames) which does work.

If I click on the leftmost link to go to the main page (no frames) and use a link on that page to reenter the frameset, the bottom frame still shows the grey screen of death. This leads me to the conclusion that the problem is somehow tied to the frame whose internal representation seem to be corrupted. I suspect that the corrupted information is tied to the frame name, because reentering a different frameset with different frame names but the same frame layout tends not to show the grey frame.

Interestingly enough, if I go to the frameless main page, flush OmniWeb's cache and then reenter the frameset, the problem usually has disappeared (in the rare cases where it still shows up in such a scenario, I'm assuming that I'm not seeing the remnants of the old problem, but instead that the event that triggers this problem simply has happend once more).

As Timothy Luoma has observed, the problem seems to happen more often with some specific (e.g. dynamically generated) pages, than with others. I've got a WebObjects system running that regularly induces the grey screen of death, unfortunately these pages contain sensitive customer data, so I cannot give you access to them in order to check it out yourselves.

Regards

Piers Uso Walter <piers at ilink.de>
ilink GmbH
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