Hello,

Customer responds:

"The application did manage to run for 4 days, then hung again. CPU usage is zero when this happens. I suspect it’s something due to Subscriptions as it happens frequently with a test environment where we have subscribed to 62 tags, but happens much less frequently on a system with only 3 tags. I suspect it may be related to the way in which the events are passed through to the calling application, if those are not being raised on the thread that creates the OPC client object. I will be looking at this again later today, part of this testing may involve changing the way that the change data events are handled, at present they use InvokeRequired and Invoke to perform UI updates but we may try to instead update a thread safe ConcurrentDictionary and then use a timer in the UI thread to update the UI data values from this dictionary object instead, thereby disconnecting the OPC client event thread from the UI thread."

They have not yet tried to disable prerequisites boxing. What he is going to try and change about his application is kind of going above my head, but I will let you know what he says the result of that is.

Regards,
GK

Hello,

Thanks for the additional information. I will recommend disabling the prerequisites boxing and will check with the customer on your other question.

Regards,
GK

Hello,

The customer replies:

"The application hangs – it doesn’t respond to anything, and has to be terminated using Task Manager. It’s as if the UI thread is stuck, which according to the DebugDiag2 output it is, as it’s waiting for the garbage collection in the OPC UA component thread to finish, but it never does. It’s not a crash – the DebugDiag2 analysis of a memory dump is for both crashes and hangs, hence the folder name, that’s a Microsoft convention and not something we defined.

The version number of the OPC UA DLL is, according to Visual Studio, 5.58.257.1.

We’ve also had the same issue with 2018.3 (version 5.54.453.1), and 2017.1 (version 5.50.323.1). We’re in the process of moving from a VB6 OPC DA ActiveX based application to a .NET version using UA, hence why we have multiple versions.

It does happen every time, but it can take hours or days for it to happen. It’s “random” in that we can’t predict how long it will take for it to happen, but it seems to happen quicker when we have more subscriptions, and every time we’ve run DebugDiag2 on a memory dump of the hung process, we’ve seen the same thing where a number of threads, including the UI thread 0, are hung waiting for the GC to complete, which has been triggered inside the thread performing an OPC UA Write.

What’s of concern is that if the data changed events are not being raised on the thread that created the OPC UA client then this could cause a hang, it might be that the GC is a bit of a red herring in that the hang occurs and it just happens that there is a GC happening somewhere. I’ve tried wrapping the event handlers in the application with checks to see if Invoke is required and not getting that, and the hang is happening before the event handler code starts – I’ve added simple logging to the start and end of all function calls and the hang occurs outside of any of the main application functions and event handlers."

Please let me know if you need anything else or require any further clarification.

Thanks,
GK

Hello,

I am working with a customer with the following setup:

Toolkit Version: 2020.2
Development Environment: Visual Studio 2019
Development Language: VB.NET
OPC Standard Used: OPC UA
.NET Framework Version Targeted: 4.7.2
Operating System: Issue is present on Win 10 (1907 & 1609), Server 2012R2, Server 2016, Server 2019

The customer's .NET application is hanging. I have attached a memory dump analysis that they sent me where we are seeing that a garbage collection, which is triggered by a thread in the OPC client, is preventing the application from proceeding.

At no point in their code are they manually triggering a GC.

The GC is triggered during a call to Opc.Ua.Bindings.TcpMessageSocket.WriteMessage. This is a single threaded application, so I am not sure where the other threads are being spun up. Is there a way to prevent this GC from occurring or some other way to prevent this hang based on what you see?

Please let me know what additional information I may need to obtain.

Thanks,
GK