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Question

Gray circle with white exclamation mark on white background

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
August 3, 2010
33 replies
204993 views

We have a digital signage app that uses the flash player OCX as a COM component within a .NET application running on XP and Win 7. Since upgrading some clients to flash version 10.1.53.64 we are experiencing a variety of issues to include:

1) fscommand calls that are being raised from the SWFs being played eventually stop being raised to (or at least received by) the application. The behavior is not consistant, and it usually takes a while for this to occur. Only an app restart seems to restore functionality.

2) Also occasionally insted of the SWF that is supposed to be playing, a white screen is displayed in the flash window. The screen has a small gray circle with a white exclamation mark in the center. When this occurs it never recovers - even when a new SWF is loaded. No errors are raised and the app "thinks" that everything is still going smoothly. Again a app restart is required to fix it.

We can usually recover from missing fscommands because if we expect a command that never comes, we can restart gracefully. Issue 2 is more problematic in that its only a visual thing - no errors or other bad behavior seem to be occuring.

Any thoughts of fixes or work arounds would be appreciated.

Thanks.

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T

Thiago Lobo

Participant

Notes: I didn't read the entire post / I'm not a developer / I don't exactly know what is the problem you're having / Yeah, I'm just lazy to read just now.

I just want to add that, here, in my computer, this happens when I have a lot of You Tube videos opened in, let's say, 7-9 tabs.

I load a video in a tab, then load another video on some other tab and so forth...when I reach 9th or 10th tab, I get the exclamation mark not only in the 10th video, but in ALL OF THEM previously opened. It's something like Flash is telling me: "Ok, too much, I can't handle this thing. I'm not running any of these".

The number of tabs varies...sometimes it happens with only 7 tabs, sometimes it take up to 10...maybe it's some issue related to Flash + memory, as I see.

My specs:

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit / 4Gb DDR3 RAM / NVidia Geforce 230M / Intel Quad-core i720-QM / Maxthon Browser / Latest Flash version 10.1.85.3

Hope this info helps someone.

Cheers,

chapter81

_

__nel78

Participant

I am still having this issue. Mostly in regards to shockwave plugins. Using the shockwave plugin to instantiate flash. Most of the time using basic animations and still getting this error. This is causing a huge amount of problems. Please help.

When I do use AS3, I don't use globals. I clear my object references, I kill my listeners, I null my objects, I even tried forcing garbage collection. Nothing.

I seriously think this is irresponsible for an Adobe Employee to say that this is a programming issue. Please supply more information Adobe. thanks.

S

shiznt

Participant

I've been having this same issue myself, and although I'm no expert, I've checked as far as I can using common sense and online resourses and I can see no immediately obvious reason why this should be taking place.

The exclamation mark appeared initially whilst attempting a large (permitted) file upload on a file sharing site (megaupload.com). I have made several attempts, with the same error/warning response each time. Secondly, it just so happened today that I was playing video via YouTube when making an upload attampt, and the video was immediately halted, and replaced with our little grey friend. Furthermore, every banner and video on every open browser tab was also substituted with said icon.

I checked both Java and Flash were up to date (they were), restarted Firefox (also tested in Safari, same result), and still I get the same result when attempting to upload.

Did anyone manage to resolve this frustrating issue?

Thanks.

A

Aubreyff

Participating Frequently

I have this exclaimation mark as well. I have a memory test running and everything is successfully garbage collected. However, I have video running intermittently every 4 minutes or so. The video is also successfully be garbage collected, unless it has been running for about one week or more. I am not seeing any lag or performance issues, which leads me to believe it has something to do with how the video (I am using MP4) is being handled in the flash player.

I have not been able to detect when this will happen with a memory test as the memory seems to stay consistent. I wonder if their are any other tests that can be done to avoid the Gray Exclaimation Point.

C

chook_rl

Participant

Hi - I am getting this type of error (Exclamation mark of death) when I am typing Hiragana (Japanese) using IME

and pressing SPACEBAR to turn it into Kanji glphys.

If I do it fast enough, I get the exclamation error.

THIS DOES NOT SEEMS TO BE A MEMORY ISSUE

I read something about length being negative... are there any other issues worth testing?

A

Anonymous

I also see the grey circle of death (GCOD). I have developed a C++ plug-in for OmniPeek, called Compass. Compass has three HTMLView windows, separated by splitters. Each HTMLView loads a .htm file, which in turn loads a .swf file. The .swf files implement charts that are updated once a second by chart data from the plug-in. The C++ plug--in communicates to the .swf through javascript in the .htm file. After running for some period of time, like overnight, I will return to see the circle of death in in all three windows. This behaviour is consistent. System.totalMemory, which is being monitored on a timer at 1 seconds intervals, is reasonable, as well as the total memory of the application, which is also reasonable. After GCOD occurs, I can open another capture window, and it will work fine, for a while.

-Spacepacket

J

joshdura

Adobe Employee

The error you are seeing is the new out of memory notification. It is basically shielding the user when memory usage gets near the system resource cap. The best course of action here (if you own the content) is to check your application for high memory usage and correct the errors. If you don't own the content, it would probably be best to contact the owners and make them aware of the issue you are seeing.

J

jdw9113Author

Known Participant

Thanks for the update. Memory issues have cropped up in the past for us. Most of the occurances revolve around either 3rd party controls, 3rd party content, or SWFs developed in Flex. Thus many times we don't have control over how they are occuring. As opposed to just displaying an icon, it would be better if the notification could be event based. This "visual based" approch does not afford developers any way to detect the condition and take the appropriate action.

J

joshdura

Adobe Employee

Developers can use the System.totalMemory property in AS3 to monitor the memory usage that the Flash Player is taking up. This iwll allow you to see how much memory is used, where leaks are and allow you to optimize your content based on this property.

D

DavidinChelseaMA

Participant

My HTC Incredible phone just got updated to Froyo, and now has Flash 10.1.

Many flash sites that didn't work before, now work well.

However, I also got the gray and white exclamation point and circle when I attempted to view a panorama on the Star Trek official movie site.

The main page worked. (I was able to activate the navigation icon on the site with my touch screen, with no trouble) but once I clicked on "panoramas," it took me to the page that had the panormas of the Enterprise, and then I got that damn exclamation point.

A

Anonymous

I'm getting this screen as well.

Windows 7 64bit, FireFox 3.6.8.

It happens after hours of non-stop play.

My SWF does not load any external assets, but it does send and receive a lot of data via NetStream peer-to-peer capibilities. However I've run into the error when the SWF was not ever connected to another SWF, and was running in a local-only mode.

My first guess was that it's a memory issue. I noticed my SWF seemed to be gradually increasing in max memory (using mr doobs stats) although garbage collection seemed to be consistently bring memory back down, it would still increase very slowly. So I decided to let it run for hours to confirm a high memory usage, but instead every time I've tried this and come back all I had was the icon described and attached in this thread. So to me that indicated memory got so high the player stopped running.

Based on the comments on this thread this does seem like something built in to the Flash Player, probably to prevent a full player crash.

A

Anonymous

I was able to replicate the error consistently.

Assignment of a negative value to the length property of a vector seems to cause this.

eg.

var tLines:Vector.<TextLine> = new Vector.<TextLine>();

var value:int = -1;

tLines.length = value

R

RUNd

Participant

Good to know. But since we don't use any vectors in our project,it is also affecting other objects, or zinc (which we use to make an executable) is adding some kind of vector to our project...

J

jdw9113Author

Known Participant

Some more information and to clarify some other questions:

Our Digital Signage software is written in .NET and uses the FlashPlayer ActiveX control . IE is not involved. Our software runs on both XP (32 bit) and Windows 7 (64-bit) and we have seen this issue on both systems.

Once the exclamation mark appears we don’t get any fscommands from then on.

Also when it happens - it happens on all players. Our software can use multiple instances of the flash player activeX control for different displays and we also have background players that "preload" some SWFs to determine if they should play. Once one goes south - they all go south.

Clarification: When I say all players - I'm still talking about the same executable. We can display multiple forms each playing a different SWF. But again only a single EXE and only on 1 computer. When we restart the EXE, its all fixed.

This event is rare: In fact we have not seen this happen once in-house - but we have hundreds of systems in the field we monitor and it will happen on a few every week or so. Now that we are gracefully restarting based on missing FSCommands, it has become a lower priority but one we'd still like to have a fix for. It only started happening when we went to version 10.1.53.64 of flash. And we have not moved forward to any subsequent vesion of flash for fear that it will break something else

O

oeasan

Participant

We are having the same problem. A white screen with grey circle and exclamation mark.

Am running a standalone application wrapped in zinc 3.0 on windows 7. Flash player version v10,1,82,76 although I am not sure if this is applicable to the standalone player.

The white screen with grey circle appears on random time intervals. The only significant actions performed are loading and unloading image's. In my search for a solution I firstly determined that there are no memory leaks. But now I am weirded out too. I can't seem to determine who is mainly responsible, the flash player or windows 7 or a combination. Although I suspect it is the player.

At work we have made many of the same kind of kiosk-like projects and we had many strange bugs but this last one is the most maddening.

I hope the standalone-part is significant extra information, and that someone can solve this!

A

Anonymous

Hi, I was just reading this thread out of curiosity since the subject line was so different. Mostly users that are having problems with Flash Player post on this Flash Forum. I have seen many many various errors and have dealt with just as many causes, but don't recall any error as described here.

It seems if any new error would appear, the Flash Player forum would most likely be the first to hear about it

If anyone does post about this, I would let you know. I just thot perhaps this bit of info would be helpful as you are trying to find a solution.

Thanks,

eidnolb

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