[R] Maximum # of DLLs reached, or, how to clean up after yourself?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

In R.utils (>= 2.4.0), which I hope to submitted to CRAN today or
tomorrow, you can simply call:

   R.utils::gcDLLs()

It will look at base::getLoadedDLLs() and its content and compare to
loadedNamespaces() and unregister any "stray" DLLs that remain after
corresponding packages have been unloaded.

Until the new version is on CRAN, you can install it via

    source("http://callr.org/install#HenrikBengtsson/R.utils@develop")

or alternatively just source() the source file:

    source("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/HenrikBengtsson/R.utils/develop/R/gcDLLs.R")


DISCUSSION:
(this might be better suited for R-devel; feel free to move it there)

As far as I understand the problem, running into this error / limit is
_not_ the fault of the user.  Instead, I'd argue that it is the
responsibility of package developers to make sure to unregister any
registered DLLs of theirs when the package is unloaded.  A developer
can do this by adding the following to their package:

.onUnload <- function(libpath) {
    library.dynam.unload(utils::packageName(), libpath)
 }

That should be all - then the DLL will be unloaded as soon as the
package is unloaded.

I would like to suggest that 'R CMD check' would include a check that
asserts when a package is unloaded it does not leave any registered
DLLs behind, e.g.

* checking whether the namespace can be unloaded cleanly ... WARNING
  Unloading the namespace does not unload DLL
* checking loading without being on the library search path ... OK

For further details on my thoughts on this, see
https://github.com/HenrikBengtsson/Wishlist-for-R/issues/29.

Hope this helps

Henrik

On Tue, Sep 13, 2016 at 6:05 AM, Alexander Shenkin <ashenkin at ufl.edu> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have a number of analyses that call bunches of sub-scripts, and in the
> end, I get the "maximal number of DLLs reached" error.  This has been asked
> before (e.g.
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36974206/r-maximal-number-of-dlls-reached),
> and the general answer is, "just clean up after yourself".
>
> Assuming there are no plans to raise this 100-DLL limit in the near future,
> my question becomes, what is best practice for cleaning up (detaching)
> loaded packages in scripts, when those scripts are sometimes called from
> other scripts?  One can detach all packages at the end of a script that were
> loaded at the beginning of the script.  However, if a package is required in
> a calling script, one should really make sure it hadn't been loaded prior to
> sub-script invocation before detaching it.
>
> I could write a custom function that pushes and pops package names from a
> global list, in order to keep track, but maybe there's a better way out
> there...
>
> Thanks for any thoughts.
>
> Allie
>
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