polygon kills X-server

Hi all,

when I make a polygon with 100,000 vertices my X-server is being
killed. This occurs in R-2.9.0 and a freshly installed R-2.10.0
I'm running Ubuntu with a locally compiled R:

uname -a
Linux onyx 2.6.24-24-generic #1 SMP Tue Aug 18 16:22:17 UTC 2009
x86_64 GNU/Linux

xlower = -2e6:2e6
xupper = rev(xlower)
ylower = runif(length(xlower))
yupper = ylower+.1
plot(NA,xlim=range(xlower),ylim=range(ylower))
idx=1:10000
# it draws fine for lower number of vertices:
polygon(x=c(xlower[idx],xupper[idx]),y=c(ylower[idx],yupper[idx]),col='grey')
# but X is killed when I draw 100000 vertices or more
idx=1:100000
# I've commented the next call to prevent people accidently
# killing their X?
#polygon(x=c(xlower[idx],xupper[idx]),y=c(ylower[idx],yupper[idx]),col='grey')

sessionInfo()

R version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26) 
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu 

locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
[5] LC_MONETARY=C              LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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


I'm sorry for the messy/non-intelligent code but I'm not eager
to clean it up and check it .... 


Any idea what might being going on here?

Thanks, Ludo

This one is extraordinary dangerous: it also killed my kind of X server
called Windows completely so that I had to reset the machine.

Perhaps it should be debugged on the Linux side with less serious side
effects....