274 categories crashes Indexer

[dbuck]

Hi again,
We are using the latest Indexer (5.0.1002). We imported a CSV file of 3000 categories and as soon as we pressed "Start Indexing", the program crashed. Through trial and error, it was determined that The indexer works fine with 273 categories, but not with 274.

The Indexer crashes in two different ways (really the same way, just a time difference):

1. Crashes a few moments after pressing "Start Indexing". (This happens with 274 categories)
2. Crashes immediately after pressing "Start Indexing". (This happens with around 1000 categories)

Does this version of Zoom support the hundreds of categories that we wish to use? Or have we found a bug?

Thanks,
D

[Ray]

That sounds like a bug. Can you give us the error message that appears when it crashes (assuming there is one)? Please include any memory addresses etc.

While there is no fixed limit to the number of categories you can use in Zoom, we must say though, that is alot of categories. I can't help but wonder if you are fully aware that this creates a massive list of categories for the user to dig through (ie. in the dropdown or list of radio buttons on the search form), and wonder how intuitive that would be - the user would need to browse through 3000 categories to find the one they're looking for!

Since we don't really have 300 categories on hand to test this, could you e-mail us your list (CSV file) so we can try to reproduce this crash?

[dbuck]

Hi again,
I have emailed you some of the text files that we used to crash the Indexer. The email has been sent to wrensoft and is entitled "Files for Indexer crash mentioned at http://wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1503".

Unfortunately, no memory errors are given when the program crashes (it is run on Windows 2000). The log also just stops abruptly with no other output than saying "Indexing.....", etc.


As for the huge number of categories, we are trying to do a workaround for the feature we posted at:
http://wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1461

To solve it, we realized that we could make many categories (thousands). But, as you say, users would have to wade through all of them. To solve this we were able to hide the categories we wouldn't want displayed using javascript and CSS. We could then setup a search form on individual pages that sends a GET query to the main search engine that contains the category we want.

You could probably consider us "stress testers" of your Indexer. We like this software a lot.

Thanks,
D

[Ray]

Thanks to the bug report from dbuck, we've located the cause of the problem, and will have this bug fixed for the next build (5.0.1003).

[dbuck]

Thanks to you, the indexer (5.0.1003) did not crash with 2800 categories. :]

Good job.

D