Core 0.14 bug? Wallet becomes invisible

[BillyBobZorton]

Something weird is going on ever since I upgraded to Core hours ago. Performance improvement is great and so on, but there is something weird happening with the GUI. It randomly becomes invisible. I thought it was the typical "not responding" crash but then I realized the GUI is still working, as you can see the menus are still clickable:



Thankfully I don't need to close the whole thing to fix it, seems like i just can close the window and then click on the task bar icon and reopen the window and its fine again.

I just find it annoying that sometimes the GUI becomes invisible, I don't know when that happens cause I don't realize what is triggering it.

[jackg]

What are the specs on your hard drive, ram and CPU?
Usually a problem of invisible windows is quite likely on many operating systems (normally if the CPU is full for example or if the data as a problem with it on transmission to your screen from the CPU).
Is this happening repeatedly? What's the Operating System also?


The only thing I can recommend from when this happened often to me is to get a dialogue box to open somehow and force the program to function (Such as alt+F,M - if that's any easier to put in and then just close the dialogue box that opens).

[74chy0n]

Something weird is going on ever since I upgraded to Core hours ago. Performance improvement is great and so on, but there is something weird happening with the GUI. It randomly becomes invisible. I thought it was the typical "not responding" crash but then I realized the GUI is still working, as you can see the menus are still clickable:



Thankfully I don't need to close the whole thing to fix it, seems like i just can close the window and then click on the task bar icon and reopen the window and its fine again.

I just find it annoying that sometimes the GUI becomes invisible, I don't know when that happens cause I don't realize what is triggering it.

It not bug, it just an unexpected feature 

[BitHodler]

Are you running core on linux?

Although it might be unrelated to your problem, this thread discusses a bug that made a terminal's GUI invisible. It was caused by a problem with a linux installation rather than the software itself.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/200458/recovering-invisible-screens-and-dropdowns-on-linux

It has nothing to do with Linux in this case as the included screenshot clearly shows that the Core client is running on a windows based machine.

I have had a similar experience with a different (not related to Bitcoin) hdd intensive application, and I solved it by defragmentation. It of course doesn't mean this is the exact same thing, but since Bitcoin Core is also hdd intensive, you could give it a try.

If you do so, make sure you make a backup of your important files. Better safe than sorry.

[BillyBobZorton]

What are the specs on your hard drive, ram and CPU?
Usually a problem of invisible windows is quite likely on many operating systems (normally if the CPU is full for example or if the data as a problem with it on transmission to your screen from the CPU).
Is this happening repeatedly? What's the Operating System also?


The only thing I can recommend from when this happened often to me is to get a dialogue box to open somehow and force the program to function (Such as alt+F,M - if that's any easier to put in and then just close the dialogue box that opens).

Im on Windows 7 64 bit, the CPU is some quadcore from 2008, 8 gigs of ram, average 7200 rpm 2 TB hard drive.

Like I said before, im fixing it by closing the window and opening it again by clicking on the taskbar (notice closing the windows does not mean actually closing bitcoin core and re-opening again which would be insanely annoying)

[achow101]

Can you post your debug.log? There might some error with Qt and those errors should show up in the debug.log file.

[2112]

Im on Windows 7 64 bit, the CPU is some quadcore from 2008, 8 gigs of ram, average 7200 rpm 2 TB hard drive.

Like I said before, im fixing it by closing the window and opening it again by clicking on the taskbar (notice closing the windows does not mean actually closing bitcoin core and re-opening again which would be insanely annoying)

On Windows this typically doesn't require anything to be done to fix itself. It is most likely caused by the UI thread getting bogged down and not responding promptly to the UI events.

You can check this yourself by opening the "Resource Monitor" from within the "Task Manager". On the "Overview" or "CPU" tab the "Status" column will show "Not responding" in red instead of the typical "Running" in black. If that's the case then you don't need to do anything for the situation to resolve itself, the UI thread will sooner or later catch up (it may even take several hours if the backlog is immense).

This isn't as much a "bug" as a "design decision". Bitcoin Core is very tightly integrated by design. Properly modularized Bitcoin client wouldn't be so easy to keep under tight control of a single development team. I wouldn't expect them to ever fix it in the open source release. They may have a closed source release without the extra-tight interlocking, the same thing that large miners do for their "bitcoind" daemons. The 0.14.x is much worse in the "not responding" symptom than the older releases, e.g. 0.10.x.

[achow101]

This isn't as much a "bug" as a "design decision". Bitcoin Core is very tightly integrated by design. Properly modularized Bitcoin client wouldn't be so easy to keep under tight control of a single development team. I wouldn't expect them to ever fix it in the open source release.

What are you talking about? Tightly integrating the GUI to the rest of the code is not a design decision made by the current Core developers. It is a holdover from the Satoshi days when Satoshi originally release Bitcoin as a Windows-only Gui-only software. They have done a ton of work to separate out and modularize everything.

They may have a closed source release without the extra-tight interlocking, the same thing that large miners do for their "bitcoind" daemons.

There is no closed source release. What the hell are you talking about? The Core devs aren't out to make everyone's lives terrible. If there were a closed source version that was much better, they would release it. Also, Core dev is an extremely nebulous term, and there really is not a formal "team" that people join.

[2112]

What are you talking about? Tightly integrating the GUI to the rest of the code is not a design decision made by the current Core developers. It is a holdover from the Satoshi days when Satoshi originally release Bitcoin as a Windows-only Gui-only software. They have done a ton of work to separate out and modularize everything.

Don't bullshit us. There was a lot of activity but very little action in modularization. And don't blame the tight integration on Windows. It was and it is a conscious decision to integrate everything tightly to have an appearance of nearly-linear development without branches.

There is no closed source release. What the hell are you talking about? The Core devs aren't out to make everyone's lives terrible. If there were a closed source version that was much better, they would release it. Also, Core dev is an extremely nebulous term, and there really is not a formal "team" that people join.

I think you are just too naive to understand the open-source poker and how it is played.

Neither you nor I could really know what does Blockstream and their consultants sell behind the closed door and NDAs. I'm positive that the three most visible mining software developers (-ck, kano, Luke-Jr) have private builds available with significantly less interlocking and much faster response times for the paths critical to mining. I see absolutely no reason for this to disappear, this was and is a primary money-making opportunity for both consultants and venture-financed firms.

Here's the link to my post from 2012 about the issue:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94453.msg1046848#msg1046848

[BillyBobZorton]

Im on Windows 7 64 bit, the CPU is some quadcore from 2008, 8 gigs of ram, average 7200 rpm 2 TB hard drive.

Like I said before, im fixing it by closing the window and opening it again by clicking on the taskbar (notice closing the windows does not mean actually closing bitcoin core and re-opening again which would be insanely annoying)

On Windows this typically doesn't require anything to be done to fix itself. It is most likely caused by the UI thread getting bogged down and not responding promptly to the UI events.

You can check this yourself by opening the "Resource Monitor" from within the "Task Manager". On the "Overview" or "CPU" tab the "Status" column will show "Not responding" in red instead of the typical "Running" in black. If that's the case then you don't need to do anything for the situation to resolve itself, the UI thread will sooner or later catch up (it may even take several hours if the backlog is immense).

This isn't as much a "bug" as a "design decision". Bitcoin Core is very tightly integrated by design. Properly modularized Bitcoin client wouldn't be so easy to keep under tight control of a single development team. I wouldn't expect them to ever fix it in the open source release. They may have a closed source release without the extra-tight interlocking, the same thing that large miners do for their "bitcoind" daemons. The 0.14.x is much worse in the "not responding" symptom than the older releases, e.g. 0.10.x.

No, I already said this is not the typical "not responding" situation. Also notice how I said that you can still click on the menu, and the menu opens (see pic). When a window is in "not responding" mode, you can't click anything. Also the fact that I just need to close the window and open it again and it works is not typical "not responding" behavior. I will check the debug later im at the office now.

[2112]

No, I already said this is not the typical "not responding" situation. Also notice how I said that you can still click on the menu, and the menu opens (see pic). When a window is in "not responding" mode, you can't click anything. Also the fact that I just need to close the window and open it again and it works is not typical "not responding" behavior. I will check the debug later im at the office now.

You've described "not responding" as "crash", but it is never a "crash". more like "hang" or "latency". Also, people tend to report "menus working" where in fact the UI thread is responding to the events from long time ago, not the current actions of the users.

My bet is still on nothing wrong being with the Bitcoin-Qt task but some general computer problem, e.g. failing disk or disk controller, bad non-ECC RAM, or one of those "power saving" graphic card issues when the computer has two graphic controllers (one Intel/AMD on the chipset for "low power", one discrete AMD/Nvidia for "high speed") that are supposed to serve same screen, but sometimes lose the mutual synchronization.

The fact that the problem tend to disappear when you minimize and restore the program window would tend to point at the graphic controller problem (hardware or software) e.g. one of those "Movie Color Enhancement" utilities that try to optimize color palettes in each window to make them look "prettier". IIRC 0.14.0 started using window composing within the Bitcoin-Qt window where it dims the most of the window and pops up other unmovable window in the center of main window to display the estimate of how much time is going to take to resynchronize the blockchain. Particularly dumb "Color Enhancement" utilities would then go to endless (or near endless) loop trying to optimize the appearance of Bitcoin-Qt window.