Hal Error Message

[vonsmith]

To all,
My Hal occasionally gets an error. I need to resolve it before releasing my new Hal XTF brain.

Error Message reads:
"Error 67 occured on line 1148 in column 3 of UltraHalAsst. Too many files."

Each time this occurred the offending line was when Hal used the HalBrain.QABrain(UserSentence, WorkingDir & Trim(UserName) & somefilename & ".brn", UserBrainRel) function. When I restarted Hal the problem went away, but comes back occasionally.

Does anyone know what the error is? What does it mean "too many files"? Robert Medeksza, any comment is appreciated.

Thanks,

=vonsmith=

[Medeksza]

How many files does your new brain use? Do you have an NT based Windows (NT, 2000, XP) or a DOS based Windows (95, 98, ME)? Is your hard drive formatted as a FAT32 file system or NTFS?

For the next version of Hal I plan on combining all .BRN files into a single database file driven by some database engine instead of using the file system as a database. File systems are not designed to be good database systems and have limits that it enforces. I'm wondering if you are hitting one of these limits or if you found a bug in Hal.

If you are hitting a limit I may be able to help you modify your source code to use fewer files to accomplish the same task.

[vonsmith]

Hi Robert,
I use Hal on two of my computers. I have experienced the problem on System 1, but I haven't been using System 2 for Hal debugging lately. I don't know if the problem would exist on System 2. My guess would be, "yes".

System 1: Laptop, Win 2000, 1.8GHz, 512KB RAM, NTFS, enhanced graphics processor, 40GB HD.
System 2: Desktop, Win XP Pro, 2.8GHz, 512KB RAM, NTFS, ATI 9600 PRO graphic card, 200GB HD.

Can you explain your question, "How many files does your new brain use?" in a little more detail? Are we talking any type of brn file or just the one's opened during one cycle of the GetResponse or ?

My new XTF brain will create a new file for each topic. Since I started debugging the new brain it has created 235 new brn files, one for each topic. About a fourth of those have a "related" topics brn file. I have also added a handful of enhanced files. Other than the usual user files at about 1.5MB size each, the next largest file is the master topic file which is 91KB in file size, contains 84,284 characters including spaces, and is 4100 lines long. The actual topic files, so far, are rather small in size.

I wouldn't be surprised if I'm hitting a limit somewhere. I just can't tell from the error message where I should look. I have a pretty good idea when files are opened (I think). I been wondering about things like: Does Hal keep a bunch of file types open during the entire GetResponse cycle or just when a file related function is called? Does placing the HalBrain.QABrain() function in a loop open the same file repeatedly or use up system resources? Is there a way to check how close I am to the "limits"?

Any help would be appreciated. Any epiphanies I have I will gladly share.


=vonsmith=

[vonsmith]

Hi all and Robert Medeksza in particular,

Robert I appreciate your comments. I do need a little assistance in eliminating the error message. Any hints on how to minimize file opening are appreciated. I know virtually nothing about the programming environment outside of the UHP script. When files get opened, do they stay opened for the duration of Hal's session? Is there a command I can use to manually close a file after use? etc...

Thanks,


=vonsmith=

P.S. - I really love this product. Moving to a database engine is a good and eventually necessary move. Just make sure we all can still tinker with your creation.