SDKill notes

[gmatelich]

Recover from stuck calculation

A. First, be sure it's not an auto-save event - autosave will often kick in at the completion of another command, making it seem as if the original command is hung.

1. Check Windows Task Manager

a. There is a spike in processor activity at initiation of auto-save, before settling down to normal processor use.
b. After the SolidDesigner.exe has completed its task, zip.exe will take over until completion of auto-save.

B. My experience the last couple of years is that there is one shot of recovery, so make sure Modeling is the active window. I usually click on Outlook then back to Modeling to be sure I see the switch in focus.

C. Hit the Pause Break key solidly, perhaps slightly longer than you would normally hit a key - but not so long that it would start sending multiple Pause Break commands. Don't use shift, ctrl, or alt.

D. Wait, don't press Pause Break again.

1. Depending on how long it's been grinding/how hard it's thinking, it may take a minute or three to acknowledge the break.

a. While waiting, check your latest save/auto-save time. It's easy to get sucked in to spending more time trying to recover than the amount of time it would take to just quit and restart.

E. Last ditch effort is to try SDKill

1. Check and remember the process ID for your hung instance of Modeling.
2. Navigate to Modeling's install directory: C:\Program Files\PTC\Creo Elements\Direct Modeling 19.0 or similar.
3. Shift right click on the directory and select "Open Powershell window here" or "Open command window here"
4. type .\sdkill -8 #### where #### is the process ID for your hung instance of Modeling

F. Enter

1. Wait
2. If this doesn't wake it up, your work is probably lost.

a. You can try F3 then enter multiple times to resend sdkill multiple times. On very rare occasion one of the additional sdkills will get through.

i. You can take out your frustration by hammering Pause Break several times.

G. Having accepted your fate of permanently hung Modeling, kill Modeling

1. In Windows Task Manager, right click on the hung instance of Modeling, and select End Process Tree. This will be sure all related processes are ended. If you just End Process only, other processes (commonly annotator.exe) will remain and set you up for higher likelihood of future crashes.

a. Alternately, type sdkill -9 #### where #### is the process ID for your hung instance of Modeling.

i. -8 is like kick, -9 is kill

H. It's small consolation, but luckily it goes faster the second time you have to rebuild your model.

1. Evaluate your auto-save scheme if you feel you've lost too much.
2. Let PTC know how much you want sdkill functionality fixed, so it is reliable again.

[gmatelich]

My experience though is that if Annotation hangs, there is no Pause/Break and no SDKILL recovery - am I missing something here?

[tom kirkman]

Hitting the Esc after the Pause/Break helps. I have been in the above situation often enough.

[gmatelich]

I just had a remarkable experience where I was able to interrupt an Annotation process. I didn't do pause/break, I did "sdkill -8" without the process ID - turns out this isn't necessary.