Stars Notes File/Performance Problems

[lwestatbus]

Are you experiencing (sometimes severe) delays when starting up or shutting down a PokerStars session? Specifically do you get major delays, even to the point of Windows reporting PS is "Not Responding" when you:

1) Click your first table in a ring game lobby
2) Have your first tournament table open
3) Shut down PS

You would need to have player notes saved in Stars to have these problems.

Sometime in December a PS software update changed the way that player notes were stored. They went from a stars-specific text format to an XML (extended markup language) format. This change is innocuous enough but... It appears that there were problems in the way the PS software encoded the notes. When I examined the Stars folder the old notes.txt file was about 1,300 kb in size but the new notes.xml file was almost half a gig!!! The file was too big to open in Notepad or WordPad so I wrote a little program to loop through 100 lines at a time. Ugh...the file was corrupt beyond belief.

I've been exchanging info with the PS technical support staff and they know about the problem. If you are experiencing these problems look in the PS folder under Program Files. If your notes.xml file is overly large (compare it to the size of notes.txt) then this is the problem. To fix it you will need to do the following:

1) Rename notes.xml to something else (notes1.xml1 will work)
2) Restart PS. PS will rebuild notes.xml from the old notes.txt file. It will not include any notes taken since the upgrade!!!

A recent release of the notes parser has fixed some of the problems but Stars is still experiencing problems. Their technical support says they are working on the issue.

My theory is that some special characters used in some player names are causing the parser to go crazy. The corrupted records always start inside the player name part of the note record.

[crack]

No. Not for me.

[miaowmiaowchowface]

yes- I'm having severe troubles with it. your theory about the incorrect characters is correct... I'm not sure what the exact remedy is sposed to be but its hard and im computer illiterate

[lwestatbus]

yes- I'm having severe troubles with it. your theory about the incorrect characters is correct... I'm not sure what the exact remedy is sposed to be but its hard and im computer illiterate

To fix it you will need to do the following:

1) Rename notes.xml to something else (notes1.xml1 will work)
2) Restart PS. PS will rebuild notes.xml from the old notes.txt file. It will not include any notes taken since the upgrade!!!

Following the steps above causes PS to quit trying to open your corrupted file since the name doesn't match any more. If there is a file called notes.txt (which was the old file PS used to keep your player notes in) PS will then take that file and recreate notes.xml (the new file name for player notes). This will be done automatically. A recent release of the PS software seems to have fixed some of the problems that were causing the corruption so when the new .xml file is created from the old .txt file it won't be as bad as it was. (I had very satisfactory results when I did this.) After a few days of play, though, the new notes.xml file started to creep up in file size and I found about six corrupted records when I opened it in WordPad. (I don't recommend that you do this unless you know how to edit xml files.)

I have been in regular communication with the PS technical support team (not the 'regular' support but the guys who actually deal with program glitches and the programmers). They are aware of the problem and are working on a fix. Their fix is going to have to include removing corruption from average players notes files.

Anyway, if you follow the two steps above you will get yourself back to normal operations but at the cost of the notes you've taken since mid-December.

Your notes.xml file should be in c:\Program Files\PokerStars. You can safely rename notes.xml to almost anything else. (Compare the file size of notes.xml to notes.txt. If it is massively larger then you have this problem.)

Good luck.

[golddog]

I once read (maybe on codeproject?) that XML is like violence: if it's not working, you're not using enough.

Just curious as to some of what you're seeing, Larry. I don't have a PS account and thus don't have access to a file.

Doesn't it seem strange that unusual characters would throw off the parser? I mean, if you have something which looks like (in your encoding):

<ns:element attr1="bob">
<ns:element2>HFD(&#$#)((&#@$E</#@$&(@
(weird char)(weird char 1)



</element2>
</ns:element2>

Even if the whitespace is due to returns, line feeds, tabs, or simply characters which don't display in my encoding, or if their encoding is Unicode and mine is UTF8, the parser should just give them to you as their ASCII values, shouldn't it? And then your encoding will handle it as best as it can, but it won't mess up the parsing.

Unless they're using multi-byte encoding and their string happens to be a byte stream of "</ns:element>", which seems pretty unlikely.

I've been away from dtd world for a while, I'm sure I'm misremembering something.

Anyway, that's a good catch and (I'm sure) good detective work on your part to sift through their file.

[lwestatbus]

Here is the structure of a short player note from the new xml file version:

<note player="brhong" label="0">[1/2 090902] AJo. </note>

The player attribute was the player name and the label was the code for the color coded labels that Stars introduced a few months ago. The square bracket text is actually my entry, including the square brackets. The whole note is saying that brhong raised with AJ offsuit in a $1/2 FL ring game on September 2nd 2009. Other notes are much more complex.

In the corrupted file, the file size would be huge as noted in the OP but also the corrupted individual notes would run forever to the right. Without exception the corruption would start after the opening quote for the player= attribute and the first character of the corruption would be a capital A with an umlaut (double dot over it). The remainder of the corruption would be strings of extended character set characters that made no sense whatsoever.

My theory is that some character used on some international player names confuse the parser and in attempting to write this character out the parser escapes into some mode that generates a massive line of 'offset' characters.

PS has dealt with this in two phases. In the first phase, with the half-gig file size, the corruption was rampant. When I 'reset' the notes file as described above, and after PS said they had fixed the problem, I did get the dozen or so corrupted records. PS now reports that they are still working on this part.

(I had actually asked PS if I could extend the structure of the notes file xml (I mean, the "x" stands for extensible) to have a structure such as

<note player="mikep15539" label="0">
<game type="3/6" date="080511">MORON raise w/ 2d pr vs. PFR.</game>
<game type="3/6" date="080316">MORONIC BLUFF. KJ--Another MORONIC BLUFF.
BLUFF. A5o b/s. AQo. BLUFF. RR AA.</game> </note>

PS recommended that I not do that as it may interfere with future enhancements.)