Error -3 while decompressing data - SOLVED

[Liam Routt]

We tried three configurations:

all 4G of memory - fail
"good" 2G alone - works
"bad" 2G alone - fail

Which said to us pretty definitively that it wasn't the amount of 
memory. Reading your description I'm kinda happy it was easy for us to 
isolate this stick!

Take care,

Liam Routt
Media Saints

On 20/01/2011 9:24 PM, John Szakmeister wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 2:29 AM, Liam Routt<liam.routt at mediasaints.com>  wrote:
>> I'm finally able to, I think, resolve this issue.
>>
>> We've done a bunch more tests, and today began pulling out hardware
>> components. Low and behold our problems disappear when a particular 2GB
>> stick is removed from the machine, and return whenever that stick is
>> present. So it would seem to be an unlikely hardware fault.
>>
>> We've tested the memory stick with MemTest and it found nothing untoward,
>> but the real-world test results are 100%. We've run four (or more)
>> successful tests since removing the memory, after never having a successful
>> run before. We've returned the memory and had a failure again.
>
> Did you replace it with a different memory stick?  Or just left it out
> of the system, so that it had 2GB less memory?  How much memory does
> your system have?  I'm curious if you're crossing a 4GB boundary here,
> and that's the real problem.  What I've found is that with some large
> branches, the C extensions didn't work correctly.  I disabled them (by
> renaming the .so's), forcing Bazaar to use the Python versions
> instead.  It runs slower, but completes.  This was particularly
> important during a pack operation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the
> problem shows up elsewhere.
>
> FWIW, I don't know if it's Bazaar's fault or Pyrex's fault.  I
> remember looking at the code, and I believe I brought it up on IRC or
> on-list... I'm not sure if that ever made it into the bugtracker
> though.
>
> -John