.Internal(quit(...)): system call failed: Cannot allocate memory

The call to system() probably is an internal call used to delete the session's tempdir().  This sort of failure means that a potentially large amount of disk space is not being recovered when R is done.  Perhaps R_CleanTempDir() could call R_unlink() instead of having a subprocess call 'rm -rf ...'.  Then it could also issue a specific warning if it was impossible to delete all of tempdir().  (That should be very rare.)

q("no")

Breakpoint 1, R_system (command=command at entry=0x7fffffffa1e0 "rm -Rf /tmp/RtmppoKPXb") at sysutils.c:311
311     {
(gdb) where
#0  R_system (command=command at entry=0x7fffffffa1e0 "rm -Rf /tmp/RtmppoKPXb") at sysutils.c:311
#1  0x00005555557c30ec in R_CleanTempDir () at sys-std.c:1178
#2  0x00005555557c31d7 in Rstd_CleanUp (saveact=<optimized out>, status=0, runLast=<optimized out>) at sys-std.c:1243
#3  0x00005555557c593d in R_CleanUp (saveact=saveact at entry=SA_NOSAVE, status=status at entry=0, runLast=<optimized out>) at system.c:87
#4  0x00005555556cc85e in do_quit (call=<optimized out>, op=<optimized out>, args=0x555557813f90, rho=<optimized out>) at main.c:1393

-Bill

On Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 3:15 AM Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera at gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/21/20 6:51 PM, Jan Gorecki wrote:

Dear R-developers,

Some of the more fat scripts (50+ GB mem used by R) that I am running,
when they finish they do quit with q("no", status=0)
Quite often it happens that there is an extra stderr output produced
at the very end which looks like this:

Warning message:
In .Internal(quit(save, status, runLast)) :
   system call failed: Cannot allocate memory

Is there any way to avoid this kind of warnings? I am using stderr
output for detecting failures in scripts and this warning is a false
positive of a failure.

Maybe quit function could wait little bit longer trying to allocate
before it raises this warning?

If you see this warning, some call to system() or system2() or similar,
which executes an external program, failed to even run a shell to run
that external program, because there was not enough memory. You should
be able to find out where it happens by checking the exit status of
system().

Tomas

Best regards,
Jan Gorecki