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Re: Kernel is quitting on me


On Mar 24, 2009, at 6:28 AM, Fernando Cucchietti wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am testing a very long worksheet, and all the pieces seem to be
> working (separately). When I use the loop that puts them all together,
> the kernel quits after a few seconds (or at least, the equivalent of
> the kernel quitting: everything goes undefined and in a weird color).
> I've tried following the computation step by step and everything seems
> normal until it just hangs. Also it seems to hang at different places
> everytime, but that *could* be that I am testing with a different
> random initial condition every time.
> I=B4ve checked if it is memory usage, it shouldn't be since the
> MaxMemoryUsed never goes above 15MB. I tried with $HistoryLength=0
> just in case. The kernel in Debugger mode also just quits.
> There is almost no symbolic manipulation either, just operations on
> lists with numeric values.
> I can't reproduce the error with simpler algorithms, and submitting
> the whole worksheet for other to find a bug seems too much.
>
> My question is then: What kind of things can cause this behavior?? I
> have really no clue since there are no error or warning messages, just
> an ugly quit. I would appreciate at any pointers to where can I start
> looking at...

I suspect you have a memory leak in a Module.  I know Mathematica is  
supposed to be garbage collected but in my experience I have found  
routines that leak, my recommendation is to use Remove on any  
variables created in modules.  I don't know what kind of code you are  
writing but I have also been able to cause some Mathematica routines  
to crash on input that doesn't seem particularly special, in  
particular I've seen SingularValueDecomposition fail on seemingly  
innocuous numeric input.

Hope this helps,

Ssezi


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