[Paraview] Paraview 3.0.2 crashes when trying to connect to a server. A bug?

[Moreland, Kenneth]

> I tried the same (copied the compiled binaries) on another machine.
> Here it works fine. I can also connect from this machine to the
machine
> that I tried previously and that crashes when the client is run
locally
> (now only running the pvserver).
> 
> So the problem seems to be with the paraview.app client running on the
> machine that I tested first. The one thing that is different on this
> machine is that it is behind a firewall and has a proxy set up. Could
> that have something to do with it?

That would make sense.  Normally ParaView will just give a warning when
a connection fails.  Maybe the firewall is somehow causing the POSIX
socket code to crash or to return in a state that causes ParaView to
crash later.

> 
> I can try and get some more info on the crash (stack trace or the
like)
> next week, but for now I can only access the machine remotely and thus
> not start the client. [how do you do stack traces on the mac with an
> XXX.app executable?]

You should be able to attach a debugger to a running application.  You
should also be able to run paraview.app/Contents/MacOS/paraview from a
debugger.

> 
> Some other 'issues' or observations:
> - when I start pvserver with eg -np 4, I only have 3 pvserver tasks
> running at about 99%, and occasionnally a 4th at ~20%. Is that to be
> expected?

I would not say it is expected, but it is not very surprising.  There
are several benign reasons this might be the case.

> - there seem to be some artefacts for eg Volume Rendering or Points
> representation (presumably at the boundaries of the rendered
sub-images).
> Can these artefacts be avoided or corrected for?

It would be helpful to see the artifacts.

> - is it possible to 'reload' sessions that were saved previously with
> the builtin server using another server setting? If I try and do so
for
> eg a saved state file, it closes the server connection and starts up a
> builtin server..

That seems to be working for me, but if the reloaded session has some
readers that point to local files, that can cause some strange things to
happen.

-Ken