As mentioned many times before the headless crash can't be fixed by debugging a users projects because it has nothing to do with your project settings or anything like that, but is being caused by the DLL itself. They have been rewriting the way the DLL communicates with SER in hopes that it solves the issue.
I'll be posting a link here soon so people can follow along with updates.
And anyone is welcome to open a support ticket or email to speak with James whenever they want if you want to share some ideas or ask what is going on directly.
If I can make a suggestion for James, for the continued success of this software, I think it is v-e-r-y important to release more platforms asap. I get that there are bugs and crashes to fix on a continuing basis. Unless the dll issue is a system wide, platform-wide issue, I would suggest setting that aside and knocking out another 10 platforms in rapid succession. The main issue going forward is that no one will use the software with such a limited number of platforms available. It is a huge footprint for anyone to do so.
This is potentially a real go-to software. But to get there needs to be offering more like 40 - 50 platforms.
For other people that do have a issue with the headless.exe error popping up all the time and pausing the submission we do prefer the headless issue get priority and get sorted because no point having heaps of engines but the main posting engine keeps crashing and affecting the overall performance.
Just dont know why it has been taking months, and in all this time the error is as frequent as it was a few months ago, so not sure what exactely the 1000's of hours were spend on fixing it as its still the same
Ya as @royalmice mentioned, for some people the headless crash stops them from being able to build links at all.
@royalmice - Different parts of the DLL have been rewritten over that time. They completely rewrote the submission engine before, right now they've been rewriting how it communicates with SER. The bug hasn't been easy to find. The problem went away a few weeks ago with an update, but then a threading issue came up so they had to redo some things.
For some of the new engines, there had to be more commands added to support them so they couldn't be done with previous versions.
s4nt0s I need some clarification. Web 2.0 blogs are common and having high authority blogs. But they are not relevant to my subject. So if it is not niche related how it could support me in rank boosting?? How it is possible?
When the crash happens it spawn more and more crash windows as different projects run in to the problem, everything starts to slow down in terms of LPM and number of submitted \ verified.
Every morning or at random times in the day when i check the vps's i first have to close a heap of crash windows, then when that is done things start to pick up.
I have already communicated with James via Serengines support ticket about the headless crash, so he is aware of what happens and when it happens with regards to headless.exe crash.. but it seems the fix is not that straight forward, but he has already indicated that it is a priority on the moment..
It is best to fix the foundation before you continue with the rest of the project, because if the foundation of serengines has issues and they are not fixed then there are bound to be issues if you continue and add stuff on top. So i am all for fixing the headless crash as a priority over adding new engines..
There are some users that seem to have the issue even with lower threads unfortunately. User hunar hasn't been able to use it because of this problem and it looks like royalmice might have the issue as well.
It can't just be for some and not others we're all using same systems aren't we, me, @metster and @echanney must be doing something others aren't which seems to avoid the crash or at least minimize it.
Anyone have good retention on webgarden? Just ran a re-ver and seems a lot of those are deleted, checked manually and it says it's blocked for breaking ToS. Looks like they're onto it.
I asked James if he thought the higher thread count caused the crashing issues and he said, "Yes because we believe the crash is caused by the communication mechanism (SER -> SERE Headless) clashing between threads. When there are less simultaneous jobs running, there is a less chance of this occurring"
I want to correct what i earlier said about the serengines crash negatively affecting the performance, i did another test to verify if this is still the case and as you can see from the below screenshot the Headless.exe crash had no impact on LPM, CPU, and only little impact on memory
The below screenshot was taken after an 12 hour overnight run.
The OS is Win 2012 R2 -- 12 GB RAM and using Dual Intel E5 - 2640 v3 cpu's with 10 dynamic virtual cores
There were a total of 4 headless.exe crash windows that showed ,but the submissions were ongoing and as you can see a high LPM and thread usage was still ongoing despite 4 headless.exe crash windows
So i would say it is more an annoyance than an actual problem.But would still like to see it fixed
@Metster - As stated before, things like opening the scripting engine would require James writing out all the commands (which are still changing) and offering training support on how to do it so right that isn't an option at the moment because it would take a lot of extra time supporting that.
Feel free to email James if you want further explanation.
@s4nt0s thanks for the updates. Do you have any timeline from James as to when new platforms may be available? Can you share this info? Maybe rather than 'soon' we can get an actual target date and specific engine with the understanding that these things can slip back from time to time? But at least on our side we can make our seo plans according to what James is up to. Right now we just don't know what he is doing. I think that would be very helpful for the users imo. On my side I can't really take a chance on adding links from just four or five platforms. I need more diversity. James has an awesome piece of software. It just needs more engines now.
re: headless.exe issue, I have never had that issue. I tested out the software at 150 threads and it had zero issues on my side.
@viking - Well, I know James was really trying to fix the crash before adding new engines just because a lot of the new engines he wanted to add will require new commands that the old version couldn't handle. I'll try to see if I can get a date on new engines, but its hard with the crash going on.
This is the SERE update link in case you missed it : dl.serengines.com/update.txt
@Metster - Yes that's what I'm talking about, the SERE scripting requires writing out all the commands and training people how to do it. Even though you want to make some engines, the large majority of users don't. Scripting engines has been available in SER for many years now and I rarely see anyone making any engines. However, I know Sven is still planning on releasing the platform trainer at some point which is supposed to make it a lot easier to create your own engines. I believe he said he would work on that after content gen is finished.
Also, you can revert back to previous version of SER by opening the installation directory and clicking on old_search_engine_ranker.exe
@viking - This is what James said in regards to new engines, "Unfortunately when developing new platforms it requires new commands or tweaks to the SERE addon (DLL+Headless). As we are in heavy testing for the Headless crash, it holds back releasing new engines because it requires the already in development new version of DLL+Headless. Once that is resolved, a more clearer timeline can be announced."
I know that's not really what you were looking for but that's all James was able to tell me
@Metster - There hasn't been a headless update lately so not sure why it would be doing that all the sudden. James mentioned he's checking with Sven to see if a latest SER update could have done anything.
How many threads were you running when this happened?
@servercookie - 4 is very low. What kind of error messages are you getting? Your proxies might be detected and causing issues.
I was under the belief that since i am using a list, and not really scraping for search engines i could move from dedicated to semi dedicated proxies.
But you migh be right, it could be proxy issues, but these are the errors i am getting , i am kinda lost right now and not sure what the correct course of action is :
I have tried only using SERengines on TIER1, thought first the reason for low results was that it might be crashing with the other GSA SER engines maybe. But that was not it, tried lowering thread and increasing with no luck, proxies are not banned at all. But i have disabled scraping, as i am using a list in anycase, from what i heard from someone else here. I dont need to scrap, as the serengines will still post
Not sure what i am doing wrong here, but here is a picture of how it looks in its current state, maybe i am overlooking something.
Any suggestions and tip/tricks would be appritiated
I remember using serengines with great success 2 years ago, managed to create 3000 + web2.0 in just 2-3 days with no problem. But now i have just hit a brickwall
The headless.exe error error everyone is talking about.. i have seen it one time .But that was after running 1000 threads over 24hour period. Once i lowered it down to 500 threads, then it never showed up.
I also checked my proxies, against google (not that i am scraping) and they all came out good. But not sure if they are banned from the web.2.0...anyways to test if they are ?
Comments
Thanks for the update log
I need some clarification.
Web 2.0 blogs are common and having high authority blogs.
But they are not relevant to my subject.
So if it is not niche related how it could support me in rank boosting?? How it is possible?