Search result overflow?

[ronaldrummer@…]

Hello! I'm using Nicotine+ 1.2.12 on a linux system. The problem is that when i search for common artist names like "prodigy" or "avril lavigne" the program crashes after about 5 seconds.

Just before this happens I get a load of warnings in my console:

"pynicotine.slskmessages.FileSearchResult? unpack requires a string argument of length 4", and the program ends in a segmentation fault.

My system specs: Nicotine + 1.2.12, Python 2.6.4 Linux kernel: 2.6.31.13-desktop-1mnb (Mandriva 2010)

Greetings, Ronald

[quinox]

Excellent question.

There are two separate problems here:

1. Nicotine crashes when searching for "prodigy"
2. Nicotine showing FileSearch? warnings

Point 1. has two aspects. Of course Nicotine should never crash no matter what you do. We fixed many GUI related issues with the last few versions, so if you try 1.2.15 you should see an improvement in this area (less crashes, more responsive interface).

That said, searching for something as generic as "prodigy" is never a good idea because of a fault in the original SKSL protocol. Search results are sent over TCP connections which are persistent by design and every OS has only a finite amount of these available. Generally speaking when you've used about 768 (windows) or 1024 (linux) of these connections the program can no longer make any new connections. There are a lot of people on the SLSK network, and many of them have prodigy tracks. Most of them will try to send you some search results so within seconds you run out of connections and N+ is dead in the water.

1.2.15 should not crash when you search for Prodigy, but you'll still run out of free connections. Therefore it's best to search for something more specific than a popular artist name, for example you could search for Prodigy in combination with a track or album title.

The second problem is the unpack warnings. These warnings can be safely ignored - they are caused by clients returning results slightly different from what is normal. Newer versions of N+ try to interpret these results in both the usual and the unusual way so you won't see as many of those warnings.

To conclude, most of your problems should disappear when you upgrade N+. Since you're on Linux it's pretty straight forward if you package manager doesn't have it yet: download  the source archive, extract it to any location you like (fe. your desktop) and then execute 'nicotine.py' that's located inside the folder. That's all you need to do :)

[quinox]

All issues should have been fixed with newer versions of n+