Any challenge with Paratext Live in 9.2?

Question

Thanks to the Paratext development team for many improvements. Has anyone had challenges with using Paratext Live in 9.2? It worked fine for us yesterday, but today it has synchronized and then immediately failed about 6 times. I think the internet is working well on both ends; we are about 300 miles apart. Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi @anon773589,

Sorry you’re still having some troubles. It would probably be helpful if you could submit a problem report from the computer(s) having the issue, with detailed information about what is happening. That will send more information to the Paratext development team to see if there are any bugs to fix.

james_post

Comments

james_post, Thanks.

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We did send out a patch for Paratext 9.2 this week that has a few Paratext Live fixes in it - your description makes me think you are running into a bug that has been fixed.

This patch isn’t released to all users yet, so you can either wait until it gets released to everyone or you can try changing Paratext to get pre-release patches (typing ‘pre-release’ in the help search box will show you the menu item to change the release stage, search for ‘normal’ for the menu item to change it back).

The main problems we’ve seen so far with Paratext Live in 9.2 is that some communication errors occur in real life situations that we didn’t see in our testing. There was also a problem with getting the session lock in some cases.

The main reason for the change was performance problems in the way that Paratext Live was doing communication with the server - each user would send a message every second, even when they had no data to send - this was required to get any updates from the server. We now use a way of communicating so that users can receive updates without having to send a request and we believe this will allow us to handle a larger number of users in Paratext Live sessions.

Since we now have users select who will be the primary editor of the session, it’s best for any reports related to Paratext Live to be sent by the person who was the primary editor. The log will contain more complete information about what was happening during the session. This is because the primary editor actually processes all messages sent by users in the session.

Hopefully we’ll get past the initial errors in Paratext Live soon - thanks in advance for your patience.

John+Wickberg
Paratext Support

Answer 2

Sorry for the stress. We restarted Paratext and it seems to be working ok for now.

Comments

Good to know! Thank you for sharing that restarting Paratext fixed it. It’s a helpful reminder to remember.

Somebody else recently said that were encountering a different issue entirely, and restarting Paratext fixed it.

Isn’t it nice when the problem has a “simple” fix?

james_post

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james_post, Thanks. We appreciate all of the work to continually make Paratext even better. We are still having more challenges with Paratext Live in 9.2 than we had in 9.1 (although we’re trying not to go back to 9.1). That is, we are encountering difficulty in connecting, or Paratext Live will connect and then almost immediately fail. At times it will seem to fail and not immediately indicate that it failed, and then trying to “leave” Paratext Live tends to cause “not responding.” At one point we were think that perhaps the internet may be at fault, and that may be the case, although we have been able to continue having lively conversations over Zoom during the difficulties. I realize that these are all anecdotal experiences and perhaps not easy to reproduce. The computer of one of our team members also doesn’t seem to recognize that a session is underway over the internet; it will ask the person about being the primary editor, even though a Paratext Live session over the internet is underway involving different people. The computer easily does Send/Receive in 9.2. In summary, this is not a complaint. We greatly appreciate all of the work being done with Paratext. We have still been using Paratext Live in 9.2, although at times it can take 20 minutes or so to connect or reconnect. If there is something we can do to make this work a bit better (other than restarting, which we have been trying), please let us know. Thanks!

Answer 3

Hello.
I am writing about the same subject. A project just upgraded to the latest version and patch and also crashes. In one project the “Start as primary editor” button appears and after clicking it the program freezes. In another project it crashes earlier, immediately after clicking on “Start Paratext Live session”.
I have Paratext 9.2.102.3 | I have submitted a bug report under my username Jose .

This team will work the next months only remotely using PTLive for this. I am thinking to ask them to go back to 9.1 to not delay their work, or do you think it is worth to wait?

Saludos,
anon689242.

Comments

I have been investigating some problems and it now seems that the server is not responding.

I have sent a message to the server admins to see if we can fix it.

Paratext 9.1 does use a different server for sessions, so it won’t be affected by this server problem.

Sorry for the inconvenience.
John+Wickberg
Paratext Support