Intermittent build failures

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kathleen_laughlin
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Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:41 pm

Intermittent build failures

Unread post by kathleen_laughlin »

We are having intermittent issues when publishing Help files on builds. On one build it works, on the next we can't open the Help file from the application. When it fails, the CHM files are doubled in size. We did reboot the build machine around the time we noticed the error. Please see attachments.
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Tim Green
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Re: Intermittent build failures

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Kathleen,

It's not possible to identify the cause with no more information than the file size. However, the doubling of size cannot come from nowhere. It at least means that the two builds are not the same. Something different must be happening between the two builds. Most likely causes include:
  • Different command lines are being called, for example with different include options
  • Different projects or copies of the projects are being published
  • Different skins are being used, and one has a lot of additional files in its baggage
The first thing you need to do is publish your CHM directly from Help+Manual rather than with a command line. Make sure that you publish to a local folder on the computer where Help+Manual is running, NOT to a network drive where CHM files will be blocked and locked by Windows. If that is OK then you know that the problem is in your build procedure, so you need to check your batch and/or ini files for errors.
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Please do not email or PM me with private support requests -- post to the forum directly.
kathleen_laughlin
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:41 pm

Re: Intermittent build failures

Unread post by kathleen_laughlin »

Hi Tim,

Thought you'd like to know what we've figured out and how we got there:

1. Can reproduce this manually at command line without changing any options, just rerunning.
2. Can reproduce on two computers
3. The source is not changing, the project is static.
4. Being compiled locally
5. Can fail with either Help+Manual or command line.
6. When successful you can observe the file bloats to the ‘double size’ before reducing to its final size. When it fails, this doesn’t happen. It’s like some finalization isn’t consistently being applied.
7. No errors are logged.
8. Fails with both 8.2 and 8.3
9. Removing random topics, resulting in smaller file size and appears to always succeed. If I add them back or others, where my size of the resulting file is greater than around 42,310,000 bytes if starts to fail.

The bottom line seems to be that our file is too large.

Thanks,
Kathleen
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Alexander Halser
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Re: Intermittent build failures

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

Hi Kathleen,

Please do a manual compilation of both CHM files.

Step 1:
Compile a (good) CHM file with H&M, disable the option "Delete temporary files" in the Publish dialog.
Verify that the resulting CHM is about 40 MB, find the folder "~tmpCHM" in your project folder and rename it to "~tmpCHM (good)"

Step 2:
Compile a (bad) CHM file with H&M, disable the option "Delete temporary files" in the Publish dialog.
Verify that the resulting CHM is about 80 MB, find the folder "~tmpCHM" in your project folder and rename it to "~tmpCHM (bad)"

Now you have 2 folders, one good, one bad with the source files that go into the CHM.

The first thing to check is: is the content of both folders about the same size? Or are there perhaps some huge images or extra baggage files that were saved to the temp folders? If there is a significant size difference, check the files in the folders and you have found the culprit.

If the good and bad folder are approximately the same size (no huge differences), fire up the "Microsoft HTML Help Workshop" on your computer and open the <projectname>.HHP file from the (bad) ~tmpCHM folder. Compile the bad HHP file manually and post the compiler results here. Maybe it's clear from the detailed compiler results of HH Workshop, what went wrong.

Pay attention to the last couple of lines of the compiler result: there's a line saying something about compression like "File size has been decreased from X to Y bytes". If this "decrease" has effectively resulted in an "increase", then you encountered a bug in the Microsoft help compiler. We'll talk about this when we are at that. Please check the folder content first and, if not self-explanatory, post the compiler result here.
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
kathleen_laughlin
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2019 8:41 pm

Re: Intermittent build failures

Unread post by kathleen_laughlin »

Hi Alexander,

To generate a good CHM, I need to remove content from the file. It doesn't seem to matter what that content is.

Thanks,
Kathleen
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Alexander Halser
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Re: Intermittent build failures

Unread post by Alexander Halser »

And the compiler report is?
Alexander Halser
Senior Software Architect, EC Software GmbH
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