[Bioc-devel] Rprintf in a multi-threaded environment

[Tierney, Luke]

No functions in the R API are safe to call from any thread other than
the R main thread.

-- Many may need to allocate from the R heap (more as ALTREP evaolves)
    and that is not thread safe;

-- Many (and with some compilation options nearly all) can signal an
    error, and the subsequent jump can only work in the main thread.

So: do not make R API calls from any thread other than the main
thread. Ever.

[Separate processes as created by approaches in the parallel package
  do not have these issues, though simple forking as in multicore can
  have other issues as pointed out by Martin Morgan.]

Best,

luke

On Tue, 29 Jan 2019, Yang Liao wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure if some C developers have gone through this problem: it seems that Rprintf cannot work safely in a multi-threaded environment. In particular, if I call Rprintf() from a then-created thread while the stack size checking is enabled (ie the "R_CStackLimit" pointer isn't set to -1), it is very likely to end up with some fatal error messages like:
>
> Error: C stack usage  847645293284 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847336061668 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847666277092 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847346551524 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847367531236 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847357041380 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847378021092 is too close to the limit
>> Error: C stack usage  847655787236 is too close to the limit
>
> , and the R session terminates in a segfault.
> After I used all means to confirm that there was no memory leakage and the real stack use was minimum, I thought it can only be the Rprintf issue. I then disabled all screen outputs from the then-created threads and the error was gone. It was also reported on stackoverflow:
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50092949/why-does-rcout-and-rprintf-cause-stack-limit-error-when-multithreading
> I tried using a semaphore to protect all Rprintf calls but it didn't prevent the error.
>
> Since my program needs to report some messages from the worker threads (created by the main thread), I wonder if there is a solution to safely do so, or I have to pipe the messages to the main thread, which in turn calls Rprintf? I hope not to change "R_CStackLimit" to disable the stack size checks because it generates a "NOTE" in R check.
>
> Cheers,
> Yang
>
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-- 
Luke Tierney
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney using uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu