Crashing on search

[Ken]

I have a big 6000 card deck, but I'm not really interested in studying them in order. I found that I could mark them all as "Exclude" (which took a while and provided no feedback that it was doing anything, so I almost killed it, but eventually it worked), and then selectively set cards I want to learn back to "Pending", which is great.

Unfortunately, to find cards I want, I have to use the search box, and it crashes about half the time I try to use it. I haven't played with it enough to tell for certain if the crashes are related to the terms I'm searching for. On my smaller decks, I don't think I've seen any crashes when searching.

Unlike before, there are crash logs, and I don't have much (or anything) else running, so I don't think it's a low memory problem. The logs all look similar to each other, and are almost identical size (within a couple bytes).

Is it safe to paste an iOS crash log here? I don't see any PII in it, but there are some long hashes which I'm unfamiliar with.

[Ernie]

I think you can paste a crash log here. Another option if you don't mind is email me at et@orangeorapple.com.

When I was testing I was searching a 90,000 card deck and had no problems, so not sure what would be going on.

First, It'd try removing all apps from memory and restarting device to see if that helps.
You might try exporting your deck to my server (Edit, tap deck, Export) then redownloading it as a fresh deck and see if you get a crash.
If still crashes and if willing, give me your deck code, and I'll download it to see if I can duplicate it on my end.

[Ken]

Hi Ernie,

I've emailed you one of my crash logs. I've got plenty more if you want them.

Only two things I can think of that are at all unusual for me:

- I'm on an iPod Touch, which has only half the RAM (IIRC) of the iPhone 4. Now, 6000 is far less than half of 90,000, and I can't imagine it making a difference, but who knows.

- I'm searching for Japanese (kana and kanji) text. It works a lot of the time, so I know FCD isn't completely broken in this regard, but maybe it's related. Again, who knows. (Maybe you, with the stack trace!)

I tried the "remove all apps and reboot", and it seemed OK for a minute. Then I opened "Music" to look at some lyrics (I didn't even press play!), went back to FCD, and the first search I tried crashed. I would be a bit surprised if the memory overhead of having Music loaded (but not doing anything) would be enough to crash it, with a 6000-card deck. It seems like there's something else going on, but I have no idea what.

Hmm...

[Tony]

Hi Ernie, since the latest update, both of my decks are crashing on search as soon as I enter a character which is not found. I've had very rare crashes in the past, but now it's 100% on this condition. One deck is 725 cards, another 115 or so. Both have a lot of Japanese characters. I'm on an iPhone 4 and tried a fresh reboot, so I don't think it's a memory issue on my end.

So just for an example, let's say I search for "h o u s e", so long as a card matches, it behaves as expected. But if I type "h o u s e z" for example, it crashes right after I type the z. Let me know how I can help. Where can I find the logs to mail to you?

[Tony]

Just one more tidbit of information - I created a new deck and added a few test cards with and without Japanese, and it did not crash on search with this new deck. My previous decks still crashed. I won't be able to try exporting and reimporting tonight, but it sounds like that might be worth a shot.

[Tony]

I apologize for the multiple posts, but I wanted to update that exporting my decks to the server and reimporting appears to have fixed the issue. I'd suggest anyone with issues try the same.

If there's any useful info I can provide, just ask.

[Tony]

Alright, I think I've found the cause - The crash only occurs IF "reverse order" is turned ON in list sorting options. Reimporting my decks turned off the reverse order option and thus "fixed" it. I'm guessing this is perhaps related to the fix you added to remember sorting order in this update?

Hope this helps.

[Ernie]

Hi Tony,

This helps a lot. Thanks! I was able to duplicate a crash on my end using your descriptions. I will look into this and get it fixed.

Ernie

[Ken]

With Ernie's help (thanks!), I was able to come up with a workaround for this: change the ordering to "Card Order", and set an additional setting to prevent it from changing back.

I guess the original bug is probably fixed now, but I don't use sorting, so it's not a big deal for me.

I'd like to mention one other thing: the reason I don't use sorting is because, as it is now, it's really not very useful for Japanese. The groupings I get are: 4 Latin entries for the cards I have that happen to begin with Romaji, and then several thousand entries that begin with kana/kanji/digits, all grouped under the heading "#".

I thought this was just how iOS always groups text, but recently I noticed that in the built-in Music app, it actually does it differently: I see the headings "あ か さ た な は ま や ら わ A . D . G . J . M . P . T . Z #" on the side. All kanji (and presumably digits, though I don't have any songs starting with digits) are under "#" (which is called "123" in the list itself). All titles that start with kana are under the appropriate one, e.g., the "は" group has tracks that start with "ヒ", "ふ", and "ぼ". (I can explain further, if you don't speak Japanese! There's probably a good Wikipedia article, too...)

Anyway, it's still not a big deal -- I still might not use sorting if it was implemented this way. The only way I really look at cards is "the order the SRS gives them to me" and "the few that matched the search terms I typed".

cheers,

[Ernie]

I might consider adding support for Japanese grouping if I knew what to do. Someone requested grouping Hiragana. It seems there are only about 100 Hiragana characters? This still seems like a bit much to group by. You mention "kana" maybe grouping "families" of characters. All these names confuse me. Ha. If you want to be a little more clear on exactly what you recommend (and any pages to read) I'll listen.

[Ken]

OK, here's a 2-minute intro. Anybody who knows Japanese will know this is technically wrong in many ways but hopefully somewhat useful.

"Kana" = Hiragana + Katakana. These are the 2 sets of phonetic 'alphabets' that Japanese uses. They're different ways to write the same sets of sounds, like upper-case and lower-case in English. But instead of individual letters, they're consonant+vowel pairs, like か = ka. (There's also plain vowel sounds, a lone "n" which is just special, and some other variants, but it's pretty regular overall.) There's about 50 each, hiragana and katakana.

Obviously 100 groupings is kind of overkill. So what my iPod seems to do is something like:
- only make groupings for each 'consonant' sound, using the 'a' vowel sound: [a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa] (this is, transliterated, what I see on the right side in the Music app)
- within each grouping, the vowels are ordered [a i u e o], so the the first characters in the sorted list would look like [a i u e o ka ki ku ke ko sa si su se so ta ti tu te to ...]
- when sorting, treat hiragana/katakana equally (ka = か = カ), and use the difference between them only as a tiebreaker (hiragana first, I guess?)

There's other variants of the characters that affect sorting, too. The Wikipedia article "Goj%C5%ABon" describes this, probably better than I could.

I imagine there's enough subtleties that there should be a standard library for doing this -- they can't expect developers to implement this all themselves every time -- but some quick googling didn't turn up anything obvious. Hmm...

Anyway, this is pretty low priority for me. There's a dozen other things I'd like to see more than this. I'll get around to writing about them one of these days.

Thanks again for figuring out the crashing problem for me!

[Ernie]

Thank you Ken for taking the time to explain some of this. Geez, not as simple as I'd hoped. This helps and I'll keep this info for when I'm ready to tackle this.

Yes, let me know if you have other suggestions for updates.

Oh, and feel free to start a new thread. I like how "Crashing on search" is just continually hanging around the top of the thread list. Good for my reputation. Ha ha.