[R-pkg-devel] Does dependencies up to date on the pretest CRAN infrastructure

[Uwe Ligges]

On 13.01.2024 10:10, Ivan Krylov via R-package-devel wrote:
> В Fri, 12 Jan 2024 21:19:00 +0100
> Serge <Serge.Iovleff using stkpp.org> пишет:
> 
>> After somme minor midficiations, I make a try on the winbuilder site.
>> I was able to build the archive with the static library
>> but I get again a Bad address error. You can have a look to
>>
>> https://win-builder.r-project.org/bw47qsMX3HTd/00install.out
> 
> I think that Win-Builder is running out of memory. It took some
> experimenting, but I was able to reproduce something like this using
> the following:
> 
> 1. Set the swap file in the Windows settings to minimal recommended
> size and disable its automatic growth
> 
> 2. Write and run a program that does malloc(LARGE_NUMBER); getchar();
> so that almost all physical memory is allocated
> 
> 3. Run gcc -DFOO=`/path/to/Rscript -e 'some script'` & many times
> 
> I got a lot of interesting errors, including the "Bad address":
> 
> Warnings:
> 1: .getGeneric(f, , package) : internal error -4 in R_decompress1
> 2: package "methods" in options("defaultPackages") was not found
> 
> 0 [main] bash (2892) child_copy: cygheap read copy failed,
> 0x0..0x800025420, done 0, windows pid 2892, Win32 error 299
> 
> 0 [main] bash (3256) C:\rtools43\usr\bin\bash.exe: *** fatal error in
> forked process - MEM_COMMIT failed, Win32 error 1455
> 
> -bash: fork: retry: Resource temporarily unavailable
> 
> -bash: R-devel/bin/Rscript.exe: Bad address

The above indeed happens if not sufficient memory would be available.
Important to know: This includes unused but committed memory which may 
be a lot.
But I doubt it is the case on winbuilder as the machines has 256GB or 
more (depending in the machine) and additionally 500GB swap space on SSD.

Best,
Uwe


> Your package is written in C++, but that by itself shouldn't disqualify
> it. On my Linux computer, /usr/bin/time R -e
> 'install.packages("MixAll")' says that the installation takes slightly
> less than a gigabyte of memory ("912516maxresident k"), which is par
> the course for such packages. (My small Rcpp-using package takes
> approximately half a gigabyte by the same metric.)
> 
> I'm still not 100% sure (if Win-Builder is running out of memory, why
> are you seeing "Bad address" only and not the rest of the carnage?),
> but I'm not seeing a problem with your package, either. If EFAULT is
> Cygwin's way of saying "I caught a bad pointer in your system call"
> (which, I must stress, is happening inside /bin/sh, not your package
> or even R at all), it's not impossible that Win-Builder is having
> hardware problems. Unfortunately, they take a lot of effort and
> downtime to diagnose and could be hiding anywhere from RAM to the power
> supply.
>