Bug: NPE during CLI import on Windows 7

[bpindelski]

During testing of 5.0.2 server with Ice 3.5, I tried doing bin\omero import C:\Users\ome\Desktop\test on my Windows 7 VM. The test folder contained 4 folders: dicom, dv, dv_single and lei.

An NPE appears randomly during the import process:

2014-05-28 11:23:37,268 28156      [      main] INFO   ormats.importer.cli.LoggingImportMonitor - FILESET_UPLOAD_END
-! 28/05/14 11:23:37:549 warning: Ice.ThreadPool.Client-0: dispatch exception:
   identity: &8=\'^G*?i,b*sO3L+m$!/c6c94d8d-4727-41ff-8ead-2d1cb753cb51
   facet:
   operation: step
   remote host: 127.0.0.1 remote port: 4063
   java.lang.NullPointerException
        at ome.formats.importer.ImportLibrary$ImportCallback.step(ImportLibrary.java:592)
        at omero.cmd._CmdCallbackDisp.___step(_CmdCallbackDisp.java:103)
        at omero.cmd._CmdCallbackDisp.__dispatch(_CmdCallbackDisp.java:165)
        at IceInternal.Incoming.invoke(Incoming.java:222)
        at Ice.ConnectionI.invokeAll(ConnectionI.java:2482)
        at Ice.ConnectionI.dispatch(ConnectionI.java:1258)
        at Ice.ConnectionI.message(ConnectionI.java:1213)
        at IceInternal.ThreadPool.run(ThreadPool.java:321)
        at IceInternal.ThreadPool.access$300(ThreadPool.java:12)
        at IceInternal.ThreadPool$EventHandlerThread.run(ThreadPool.java:693)
        at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

This needs verification on a bare-metal Windows VM to exclude any I/O issues that VirtualBox? could introduce.

[bpindelski]

And that is another case of VM-bias. After upgrading the settings in VirtualBox? to use 2 CPU cores and 4096 MB of the host system's RAM, the NPEs disappeared (tried 3 times in a row). This means my VM settings were below the minimum system requirements for OMERO.

[jamoore]

Interesting! Still not sure I understand how this happened, but if we see something like this on a user's VM it will be good that we can make a suggestion. Is it clear enough to document somehow?

[bpindelski]

I think that http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/omero5/sysadmins/system-requirements.html does a good enough job. I'd be wary of encouraging or mentioning running OMERO in a Windows Virtualbox VM (our OVA is an exception - it's for testing purposes, runs Linux and has more resources available due to no GUI).