Should web apps lock up when selecting text in Windows console?

I’ve deployed a lot of Xojo web apps running on Windows over many years, but never noticed this before:

My stand-alone web apps on Windows Server 2016 run fine 24/7 for weeks or months at a time, UNLESS/UNTIL someone with server access clicks or drags the mouse in the web app’s console window.

As expected, the system highlights the text, pausing scrolling until you press ENTER (which copies the selected text, removes the highlighting, and resumes scrolling.

While text is highlighted, It also seems to pause the web app (I’m not sure if it does it immediately or if the web app keeps running until some internal buffer is full).

Users can’t connect. The server stops responding for existing sessions. It’s like it’s crashed… until you press ENTER to copy the selected text: the highlight disappears and the server starts responding again (maybe not instantly but within less than a minute.

Is that expected behavior? If so, is there any way to alter the behavior? If not, what could be causing it?

One of my sites runs a bunch of stand-alone web apps on their server, leaving the consoles tiled on the screen to see that status messages going by–but someone with server access occasionally accidentally clicks on a window and doesn’t notice the highlighted single character until users call that the app isn’t available. :frowning:

You really should be running those as services because even worse than freezing your app would be that is one of those Windows gets closed, so does your app.

The firm likes to keep the windows up because of the on-going status messages (every time someone logs in, or sends a text, or a text is received, etc.). What would be the best approach to have those messages continuously visible if the app were run as a service?

A separate app just to display messages?

A couple other options off the top of my head:

You could write the status messages to the system log and use a viewer to read them, such as DebugView.

You could have a separate admin/log page in the web app that shows this information.

[quote=426106:@Seth Ober]someone with server access clicks or drags the mouse in the web app’s console window.
As expected, the system highlights the text, pausing scrolling until you press ENTER (which copies the selected text, removes the highlighting, and resumes scrolling.
While text is highlighted, It also seems to pause the web app[/quote]
On our Windows machines at work, we have some “AutoStart/Logon Batch Scripts” that pop up in a Console/Cmd-Window.
And every now and then I happen to do this by accident…
…all I want to say with that: It most likely hasn’t got much to do with what kind of process is running, as this happens to both Batch Scripts or whatever app(s) you have running in a Console/Cmd-Window. So the Xojo WebApp can’t be blamed for that :wink: