R crashes when resizing windows (PR#2992)

I've now committed changes to R-patched which appear to fix this
crash, at least on my system.

The problem was as follows:

During resizing, R allocates multiple bitmaps, then deletes them all
at the end.  If resources are tight (or if you do a lot of resizing),
you can run out of something (not sure what) and then the bitmap
allocation will fail.  This is supposed to give you an error message,
but it was leading to a crash.

To make the problem worse, intermediate allocations weren't always
being freed.

I've fixed both problems now, and am uploading a binary Windows build
to <http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/r-devel>.  Please
download and install rw1070pat.exe (22,183,871 bytes) and see if you
can get it to crash or act badly now.

I'm heading out of town for a few days, so I'm not likely to respond
to reports immediately, but I'll do so as soon as I can.

Duncan Murdoch

I've now committed changes to R-patched which appear to fix this
crash, at least on my system.

The problem was as follows:

During resizing, R allocates multiple bitmaps, then deletes them all
at the end.  If resources are tight (or if you do a lot of resizing),
you can run out of something (not sure what) and then the bitmap
allocation will fail.  This is supposed to give you an error message,
but it was leading to a crash.

To make the problem worse, intermediate allocations weren't always
being freed.

I've fixed both problems now, and am uploading a binary Windows build
to <http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/r-devel>.  Please
download and install rw1070pat.exe (22,183,871 bytes) and see if you
can get it to crash or act badly now.

I'm heading out of town for a few days, so I'm not likely to respond
to reports immediately, but I'll do so as soon as I can.

I cannot (re)produce a crash anymore, instead the message "Insufficient 
memory. Please close the console." appears.
Is there any reason for closing the console?

Uwe

Duncan Murdoch wrote:

I've now committed changes to R-patched which appear to fix this
crash, at least on my system.

The problem was as follows:

During resizing, R allocates multiple bitmaps, then deletes them all
at the end.  If resources are tight (or if you do a lot of resizing),
you can run out of something (not sure what) and then the bitmap
allocation will fail.  This is supposed to give you an error message,
but it was leading to a crash.

To make the problem worse, intermediate allocations weren't always
being freed.

I've fixed both problems now, and am uploading a binary Windows build
to <http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/r-devel>.  Please
download and install rw1070pat.exe (22,183,871 bytes) and see if you
can get it to crash or act badly now.

I'm heading out of town for a few days, so I'm not likely to respond
to reports immediately, but I'll do so as soon as I can.

I cannot (re)produce a crash anymore, instead the message "Insufficient 
memory. Please close the console." appears.
Is there any reason for closing the console?

Probably.  That means that one of the internal structures has not be
allocated, and carrying on would lead to a crash (or at least, that is
what it meant before Duncan's recent changes).

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

I've now committed changes to R-patched which appear to fix this
crash, at least on my system.

The problem was as follows:

During resizing, R allocates multiple bitmaps, then deletes them all
at the end.  If resources are tight (or if you do a lot of resizing),
you can run out of something (not sure what) and then the bitmap
allocation will fail.  This is supposed to give you an error message,
but it was leading to a crash.

To make the problem worse, intermediate allocations weren't always
being freed.

I've fixed both problems now, and am uploading a binary Windows build
to <http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/r-devel>.  Please
download and install rw1070pat.exe (22,183,871 bytes) and see if you
can get it to crash or act badly now.

I'm heading out of town for a few days, so I'm not likely to respond
to reports immediately, but I'll do so as soon as I can.

Duncan Murdoch

Like Uwe, I also get the same message: "Insufficient memory. Please close 
the console." Click the OK button and the console window remains, but 
blank. Start to resize it again and all the text content reappears and R 
seems to be working normally again. This is the same for pager windows and 
in both MDI and SDI mode.

So it doesn't crash now, which is great!

Gavin


* *
Dr Gavin D. Alexander
Department of Statistics
Mathematics Building
University Gardens
University of Glasgow
GLASGOW G12 8QW
SCOTLAND

Tel:   0141-330-4852
email: gavin@stats.gla.ac.uk

I cannot (re)produce a crash anymore, instead the message "Insufficient 
memory. Please close the console." appears.
Is there any reason for closing the console?

Does this happen in normal use, or only if you push things by resizing
continuously for a while?  I can get it to happen, but only by
resizing the window continuously for a minute or two. It's what I
consider to be a design flaw in Graphapp that it does a lot of
allocations during resizing, but doesn't do the deallocations
immediately  --  it just adds items to a list to be deleted at a later
time.  If you push too hard, it runs out of some resource (I think
it's device contexts) before it has done the deallocations, and you
get that message.

It's actually safe to proceed, but you need to find some way to
trigger a redraw *after* the resources have been recovered, or you
won't see anything in the console.  The simplest way to do this is to
resize the window once more.  Perhaps I should change the error
message, but if this only happens when you torture R, I don't think
it's a priority.

I think a better long term solution is to move away from Graphapp.

Duncan Murdoch

Like Uwe, I also get the same message: "Insufficient memory. Please close 
the console." Click the OK button and the console window remains, but 
blank. Start to resize it again and all the text content reappears and R 
seems to be working normally again. This is the same for pager windows and 
in both MDI and SDI mode.

That's good news.  I've found a slightly better patch that seems  to
remove that error too, but I won't be able to upload a binary build
that incorporates it for a few days.  I'm not sure if I can even get a
connection to commit the patch to the source tree.

The new patch releases the resources after each resize attempt, rather
than waiting until the end, so you aren't likely to run out no matter
how much you try.

Duncan Murdoch