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Re: Mathematica 5 and Windows XP

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg54623] Re: [mg54563] Mathematica 5 and Windows XP
  • From: János <janos.lobb at yale.edu>
  • Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 03:21:26 -0500 (EST)
  • References: <200502230811.DAA26563@smc.vnet.net>
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

On the Windows side I do not know, because I am still at NT4.0, but on 
the Mac Mathematica is capable to squeeze every bit of available memory 
out of the system.  I observed many times that on a 640MB iBook The OS 
leaves about 495M for programs after boot.  After long running 
Mathematica sessions I see in top sometimes 595M free ram when I start 
with a fresh kernel, that  is Mathematica was forcing the OS to give up 
memory and to retreat back to the very basics.  Now the side effect of 
it is that when I collect too much data and the kernel crashes by 
overstepping the 2G limit in virtual memory, then the OS has a hard 
time to recover.  Many times in that situation I am unable to Quit or 
Force Quit Mathematica.  If I am able to quit from Mathematica, then 
the OS reports just very meager amount of available memory - from 6MB 
to 250MB - , so I have to restart the machine anyway.  I observed this 
with all the big cats {J,P,T}, so either something is fundamentally 
wrong how Mac OS X handles memory, or Mathematica does not comply with 
the rules.

János
On Feb 23, 2005, at 3:11 AM, Skirmantas wrote:

> I suspect Mathematica 5 was the culprit of two nasty Windows XP
> crashes I have experienced during the past four months. In the second
> one, Internet Explorer (which was running when Mathematica's kernel
> crashed) got hopelessly corrupted. I'm not 100% sure it's Mathematica,
> but it is my prime suspect. Even if it is Mathematica, I'm ready to
> forgive it because it is such a great piece of software otherwise.
> However, it would it interesting to know when Mathematica is known to
> crash and what can be done to avoid destabilizing Windows (which is
> NOT a great piece of software). After the second crash, my rule is
> this: don't run anything else when Mathematica is working.


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