[Rd] issue with parallel package

[Josef Leydold]

Dear maintainers of the parallel package,

I ran into an issue with the parallel package in R-3.1.0.

The following code prints the message "NULL!" quite a lot.

library(parallel)
for (n in 1:1000) {
       p <- mcparallel(sqrt(n))
       res <- mccollect(p, wait=FALSE, timeout=1000)
       mccollect(p)
       if (is.null(res)) cat(n,"  NULL!\n")
}


It does not happen in R-3.0.3.
(To be exact, I have checked out R-devel revision r65130
 for my current tests.)

I found that this behavior is introduced in revision r65143.

When I insert
   Sys.sleep(0.1)
in the loop then this behavior disappears in R-3.1.0.

There is also another difference between R-3.1.0 and R-3.0.3:
When the line
   mccollect(p)
is replaced by
   mccollect(p, wait=FALSE, timeout=1000)
then in R-3.1.0 some child processes are not terminated and some
pipes remain open. This does not happen in R-3.0.3.

Remark:
If the line
   mccollect(p)
is omitted at all then "NULL!" is never printed but
R aborts after 510 iterations of the loop with the message
"Error in mcfork(detached) : unable to create a pipe".
Then none of the child processes is terminated and
number of possible open pipes is exhausted.

Is this behavior intended or a bug?


> version
               _                           
platform       x86_64-pc-linux-gnu         
arch           x86_64                      
os             linux-gnu                   
system         x86_64, linux-gnu           
status                                     
major          3                           
minor          1.0                         
year           2014                        
month          04                          
day            10                          
svn rev        65387                       
language       R                           
version.string R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10)
nickname       Spring Dance                


best whishes
Josef

-- 


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Josef Leydold

Institute for Statistics and Mathematics
WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business)

Welthandelsplatz 1, Building D4, 1020 Vienna, Austria

Phone +43 1 31336 4695  FAX +43 1 31336 904695  email josef.leydold at wu.ac.at

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