Multibit Freeze-Ups!

[gogxmagog]

Twice my Multibit client froze completely after I hit "send" while sending coins. Neither time was I able to unfreeze any other way except to ctrl+alt+delete and end process. they were small transactions to satoshidice, and I dont keep much in the wallet to begin with, but I jumped a bit anyway. I reopened the client and saw my remaining BTC was intact, but the transactions remained unseen by blockchain for a loooong time before resolving. all the while i'm thinking "what if it was a significant transaction?" I looked through the blockchain and both transactions went where they should have, but I want to understand why my client froze. I was in fact running msert at the time, both times. would that contribute to the freeze? I understand about the allowing process bitcoin.exe function in microsoft security essentials, is there something similar to how msert works? I cant think of anything else that was going on with my comp at the time, besides running firefox, which was acting buggy as well, but never when msert isnt running.
(the msert killed a trojan btw)

Thanks 

[1715078619]

1715078619

[jim618]

Which version of MultiBit are you running ?

There were improvements to how things were locked in 0.4.23 and there are more in 0.5.9rc1.
As you can imagine there is a lot of activity on a send including network IO and disk IO.
I imagine msert is monitoring/ interacting with all of these.

The main reason MultiBit freezes is because of deadlocks - this is where one thread has a lock on object A and is wanting to access object B, but another object has a lock on object B and is waiting to access object A. Mike has done a lot of work on improving this in bitcoinj v0.8 which is in the latest MultiBit 0.5.9rc1 code.

(Mike has implemented reentrant locking if you are interested)

[gogxmagog]

I'm running the 4.23. I will dl the newer one! I will also avoid running msert while using. thanks. It's actually bug free when I am not running msert, but I'll upgrade anyway, I'm a fan of your product!

One other thing, is it normal for me to lose all the labels I have put on my keys when I import them? last time I imported my private keys to a new multibit client everything worked fine except all my labeled addresses no longer have labels. Its not the end of the world for me, but a little confusing.

[jim618]

Sounds like it is something to do with the interactions with msert from your analysis. I am not sure i can do much about that.

There should be a release of the 0.5.9 code tomorrow (Monday) so you might want to wait for that.

The private key export file is as simple as it can be so does not have any extra information in it.
This means the labels aren't in there, but does have the advantage that the format is very stable and has not changed since it was created. Thus any copy of MultiBit can read any export file. Blockchain.info and the Schildbach Bitcoin Wallet can also read them.

If you want everything backed up a copy of the .wallet and .info file is what you want.

[gogxmagog]

thanks!