Converting doc/docx/pdf/text to each other

[dennisgorelik]

Lots of applications need to load and convert document files of different formats into other formats or into text.
You would have think that there would be a good solution to it.
Unfortunately it's not the case.
Existing solutions are either for desktop only, or buggy or extremely expensive (~$10K/year).

I thought I found a solution - DevExpress Document Server library for $599.99

Unfortunately, after running for couple of weeks it crashed my service with StackOverflowException exception:
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https://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/Question/Details/T257097
To my regret, there is no simple workaround to avoid this exception with your document. Regarding the time frame for fixing this issue, it is difficult to provide any estimate in such cases.
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So now I need to find a way to prevent my service from dying in case if some random document is fed into it.

Sigh.

Comments

[sagarasousuke.livejournal.com]

cron 1-min check & restart if service crashed? fast'n'dirty fix when you have a queue to process (i.e. mark "supposed bad" document as "check-manually" and skip it).

[dennisgorelik]

We made a workaround similar to it:
1) Autorestart of our windows service in case of crash.
2) Remembering the hash of resume that crashed and do not convert it next time.

However that is only ok as an ugly patch, because our windows service runs many other processes in parallel to that document converter queue.
All these processes are terminated in the middle.

Another problem is that web site will also crash.
Fortunately IIS automatically recovers crashed thread, but still it makes me think that hard crashes like these can add instability to our system.

[sagarasousuke.livejournal.com]

kind of "reliable processing system to be made of unreliable elements", where task state is divided from the processing made with (unstable) agents/services.