[R] multicore children not quiting

[Simon Urbanek]

On Feb 5, 2010, at 10:04 AM, Markus Loecher wrote:

> Hi Simon,
> I recently switched to a different flavor of Linux and find that the children that are spawn off by e.g. mclapply() seem to persist forever until I kill them explicitly.
> Is there anything I can do ?
> 

I can reproduce the issue on Debian amd64 Linux and it seems that for some reason an additional wait() is necessary there on 64-bit Linux to get rid of the last child. The easiest work-around is to simply run

selectChildren()

when you what to get rid of any zombies. I'll need to look at the code to see if there is some clean way to handle this.

Thanks,
Simon


PS: feel free to forward this to the thread you mention below so it gets filed accordingly.


> 
> This user seems to have noticed sth. similar:
> http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/r-help@r-project.org/13105537.html
> 
> Thanks !
> 
> Markus
> 
> PS my system info:
> > version
>                _                            
> platform       x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu      
> arch           x86_64                       
> os             linux-gnu                    
> system         x86_64, linux-gnu            
> status                                      
> major          2                            
> minor          10.0                         
> year           2009                         
> month          10                           
> day            26                           
> svn rev        50208                        
> language       R                            
> version.string R version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26)
>