[Rd] Sys.sleep() burns up CPU on Solaris 8

[Prof Brian Ripley]

That looks like a Solaris quirk.  Normalization of the values is not 
required by the POSIX standard, nor by the other implementations we have 
tested.  The Solaris 7 man page does mention the restriction though.

We will change it for 2.3.0, thank you.


On Fri, 31 Mar 2006, Stephen C. Pope wrote:

> I noticed that R was burning up 100% of a CPU when a call to Sys.sleep()
> was made. Upon investigation, I discovered that R_checkActivityEx() in
> src/unix/sys-std.c was putting the entire timeout (in usec) into the
> struct timeval tv_usec member, leaving tv_sec set to 0.
>
> I don't know about other unix variants, but Solaris requires that the
> timeout value be normalized (i.e. 0 <= tv_usec < 1000000). Because a
> value greater than 1000000 was being placed in tv_usec, select() was
> returning an error (EINVAL) immediately, causing R_checkActivityEx() to
> return immediately. This caused do_syssleep() to loop continuously until
> the desired elapsed time had evolved. A rather sleepless sleep ;-).
>
> The following patch against R-2.2.1 fixes the problem. Note that the
> test of the return value for R_SelectEx() was also incorrect; although
> harmless, it was treating the error return (-1) as a successful return.
>
> stephen pope
> scp at predict.com
>
>
> Here's the patch.
>
> build_main at mambo:/vobs/products/R> gdiff -ub src/unix/sys-std.c@@/main/3
> src/unix/sys-std.c
> --- src/unix/sys-std.c@@/main/3 Thu Jan 12 11:39:55 2006
> +++ src/unix/sys-std.c  Fri Mar 31 23:12:16 2006
> @@ -294,13 +294,13 @@
>         else onintr();
>      }
>
> -    tv.tv_sec = 0;
> -    tv.tv_usec = usec;
> +    tv.tv_sec = usec/1000000;
> +    tv.tv_usec = usec % 1000000;
>      maxfd = setSelectMask(R_InputHandlers, &readMask);
>      if (ignore_stdin)
>         FD_CLR(fileno(stdin), &readMask);
>      if (R_SelectEx(maxfd+1, &readMask, NULL, NULL,
> -                  (usec >= 0) ? &tv : NULL, intr))
> +                   (usec >= 0) ? &tv : NULL, intr) > 0)
>         return(&readMask);
>      else
>         return(NULL);
>
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>
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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