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Thomas Hagedorn - Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion

Thomas Hagedorn - Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion

by Arnold Pizer -
Number of replies: 0
inactiveTopicHardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion topic started 9/23/2004; 9:20:05 PM
last post 9/24/2004; 6:29:52 PM
userThomas Hagedorn - Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion  blueArrow
9/23/2004; 9:20:05 PM (reads: 995, responses: 3)
I just ran into an odd problem. I deleted a problem from an already created problem set for my class. Everything works fine when you view the problem set on the screen. But now, one gets a hardcopy error when one tries to get hardcopy of the problem set. Before the change (but a day or so again), I printed out a copy of the old, unchanged problem set without any difficulties. The specific error message is below.

What I also notice is that when I click on the button to see partial pdf output, the output includes the deleted problem. So either the newer problem set isn't getting processed or Webwork isn't looking at the new updated problem set.

We are running Webwork 2.01.

-Tom

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Hardcopy Generator Software Error

WeBWorK has encountered a software error while attempting to process this problem. It is likely that there is an error in the problem itself. If you are a student, contact your professor to have the error corrected. If you are a professor, please consut the error output below for more informaiton. Error messages

Failed to generate PDF from tex Error context

Call to /usr/bin/pdflatex failed: No such file or directory Some pdf output was produced and is available here. No log file was created, suggesting that pdflatex never ran. Check the WeBWorK configuration to ensure that the path to pdflatex is correct.

Updated: 9:16pm on Sep 23, 2004

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userThomas Hagedorn - Re: Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion  blueArrow
9/24/2004; 8:59:48 AM (reads: 1219, responses: 0)
We still haven't solved our hardcopy problem but it may be only a coincidence that I changed the above problem set and then the hardcopy error occurred. Other courses are seeing similar errors now. Our best theory is that there may have been an upgrade to the tex system on our campus that changed some settings having to do with pdflatex. We're looking into it.

By the way, sometimes we're getting pink screens generated because the system is taking too long to generate the html for a problem. I notice that we have a command kswapd that takes up about 13% of our CPU time and has been running for about a week. Would that be a normal Webwork process or a process that has gone into an infinite loop?

Thanks, Tom

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userJohn Jones - Re: Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion  blueArrow
9/24/2004; 10:25:38 AM (reads: 1224, responses: 0)
kswapd is a normal system process which should run forever. It takes care of memory swapping. The system will use hard disk space to emulate extra ram, but it has to move information back and forth between disk and ram in the process.

If kswapd is taking lots of time, it could mean you could use more ram, should update the system software (a quick web search showed red hat had a bug fix related to kswapd performance), or that not much is going on in the system (when not much is happening, a minor process can get a big share of the cpu time).

John

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userThomas Hagedorn - Re: Hardcopy Problem with Problem Deletion  blueArrow
9/24/2004; 6:29:52 PM (reads: 1214, responses: 0)
Thanks John.

Our system is now working again and we have only a guess as to what the error was. It wasn't our new tex setup as it didn't change today and the system started working fine again. Nor did we restart apache.

Our only guess is that pdflatex must have hung on some command sent to it, thereby preventing pdflatex from running for anyone else. After 12 hours or so, Webwork must have purged that job and the problem disappeared.

Any help would be appreciated. For now, everything works fine.

-Tom

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