Octave sleeps with 2000 tmp files :(

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Apr-2002, Ana O'Lyric <address@hidden> wrote:

| I have faced the following problem:
| In Octave, I am running a program that
| makes a lot of figures in a cycle.
| I have found that as soon as the number
| of tmp files reaches approximately 2045
| or so, Octave ``falls asleep.''  
| It just stops doing anything!
| It even doesn't occupy the CPU.
| Is there anything that can be done to fix
| this problem except for giving 
| purge_tmp_files? (It works too fast deleting
| necessary tmp data before gnuplot managed
| to plot them.)

Octave places no limit on the number of open files, but your OS or
shell might.  For example, on my system:

  $ ulimit -a
  core file size        (blocks, -c) 0
  data seg size         (kbytes, -d) unlimited
  file size             (blocks, -f) unlimited
  max locked memory     (kbytes, -l) unlimited
  max memory size       (kbytes, -m) unlimited
  open files                    (-n) 1024
  pipe size          (512 bytes, -p) 8
  stack size            (kbytes, -s) 8192
  cpu time             (seconds, -t) unlimited
  max user processes            (-u) 256
  virtual memory        (kbytes, -v) unlimited
  $ ulimit -n unlimited
  bash: ulimit: cannot modify open files limit: Operation not permitted

Still, I'm not sure why your Octave process is stopping without any
messages when you (apparently) reach a limit on open files.  Octave
should open the plot files, write the data and close them.  I'm not
sure what gnuplot does.

Can you submit a complete bug report to the bug-octave mailing list
that demonstrates the problem?

Thanks,

jwe



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