R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)

Wed, May 4, 2016 3:14 PM #

Hi Simon!

Sure, but who do you tell it if you don't know the killer?
This is all the killer left me with, the 'crime scene' if you like :-)

Killed: 9

My colleague Wayne Oldford also tried it on his Mac machine and
apparently the killer went further down the hallway to his office
now... so scary. Here is Wayne's sessionInfo():

R version 3.2.4 (2016-03-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.10.5 (Yosemite)

locale:
[1] en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8/C/en_CA.UTF-8/en_CA.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] rsconnect_0.4.1.11 tools_3.2.4

Cheers,
M

Simon Urbanek

Wed, May 4, 2016 5:54 PM #

On May 4, 2016, at 6:14 PM, Marius Hofert <marius.hofert at uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

Yes, indeed, scary - since it means someone is killing R which means there is not much R itself can do about it. In fact from the syslog I see

May  4 20:48:11 ginaz kernel[0]: low swap: killing pid 56256 (R)

so it's the kernel's own defense mechanism. The bad thing is that R cannot do anything about it - the kernel just decides to snipe processes it thinks are dangerous to the health of the system, and it does so without a warning.

Cheers,
Simon