[info-mcl] process crash

[Ron Garret]

On Jul 21, 2009, at 11:39 AM, Terje Norderhaug wrote:

> On Jul 20, 2009, at 4:22 PM, Alexander Repenning wrote:
>> Just wondering... has anybody found any work around the process
>> problems in RMCL. At least so far I have not been able to use
>> process-run-function in a way that is NOT causing a crash.
>
> I have found that there are some situations in which starting a
> process on RMCL leads to a crash (G4/OSX 10.4.11) while starting a
> process works fine in other situations. Perhaps by mapping it out, we
> can find patterns and clues to resolve the issue?
>
> As I've mentioned already, evaluating a process-run-function in the
> listener typically leads to a crash:
>
> (process-run-function "Seldom Starts" (lambda ()()))
>
> However, sometimes even that works fine (after RMCL has been running
> for some time?).

I did a little investigating, and found the following:

1.  If I call (process-run-function "Seldom Starts" (lambda ()()))  
just after RMCL starts it crashes with 100% reliability.

2.  If I do (dotimes (i 100) (cons i i)) before spawning a process, it  
works with 100% reliability.

3.  Running the loop only ten iterations was not enough.  It still  
crashed 100% of the time.

4.  In between I found cases where spawning processes worked for a  
while and then crashed.  I did not do exhaustive tests to fully  
characterize the behavior.

This suggests that just putting (dotimes (i 10000 or so) (cons i i))  
in your init.lisp file might be an adequate workaround, though it  
would be nice to know what's really going on.

rg