XY SIEZURES

[ROB PERSCHAU]

First, thanks for your help on the AP wire strip program. Helped me a lot. I
have a problem that has vexed us for some time here at our newspaper. We're
running XyWrite 3+ on 386s with 4 megs of ram on down to Model 25s with 640 on
an Ethernet network running PCSA. Whenever a user requests a directory from our
VAX, we exit XyWrite and ask the fileserver to assemble the directory and write
it back to the user's network drive. Xy then calls the file to the screen. Our
programmers have fixed it so users can select a story from the list and have
that request written out to the fileserver and the story is brought up on
screen. I hope that's clear. The problem comes when the directory starts
getting pretty long. One in particular is 4,200 lines long. Once this file is
brought to the screen Xy will refuse to do any other network related functions.
It will not, for instance, perform the get function on any file in that list.
If you abort the list you cannot usually even get a shorter list, or if you
can, you can't get files from that list. The solution to it seems to be to quit
Xy and log right back in. And then never try to get such a big list again. This
may or may not be related, but one user with 680 files in her network drive was
prevented from getting a file from that drive. Xy reported various errors,
including out of memory, disk full and file not found. We couldn't run a
directory in Xy, but were able to pare the directory down from the DOS prompt
and that cleared up the problem. Are these things bugs in PCSA, or, as our
programmers think, bugs in XyWrite. (They'd be the last people to defend PCSA,
bythe way). Thanks for any ideas. Rob Perschau