[R-SIG-Mac] R GUI Cannot load Interface Builder

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Well, the error seems clear: your R session has too many files open. 
Now most OSes do have limited tables of files per process, but the 
numbers are not small: on Mac OS I believe it is 256 (that's what bash 
reports on mine): 1024 is a common value for other Unixen.

You could try closeAllConnections(), in case that helps enough to let 
you shutdown the session (but R allows only 128 connections, so that 
is not the main cause here).

Have you any idea what you might be doing that opens hundreds of 
files (at a lower level than R).  Are you actually using those spatial 
packages (it might be one of those)?

It is possible to raise the limit on the number of open files (in 
bash, ulimit -n), but this is not advisable unless you need it.

On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Roland Kaiser wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I'm using the R GUI with joy ever since, despite some occasional
> misbehaviour. However, the last days I have noticed some errors
> that really waste a considerable amount of time.
>
> I'm sorry, I can't come up with a reproducible example,
> but I try to explain how the error was raised in my case.
>
> During testing of code I subsequently executed
> lines by cmd + return.
>
> After several times suddenly the working directory
> in the GUI shows <deleted> instead of the path.
> Maybe I did some strange key combination here,
> but in the past I did never deleted the path by accident?
>
> The console then states:
>
> 2009-03-20 10:06:08.537 R[620] Cannot load Interface Builder file 
> '/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/German.lproj/NSAlertPanel.nib'
>
> I am not able to save any open files, but can copy
> and paste to TextEdit to prevent loss.
>
> Funny to see what sessionInfo() tells invoked after.
>
>> sessionInfo()
> Fehler in gzfile(file, "rb") : kann Verbindung nicht öffnen
> Zusätzlich: Warning message:
> In gzfile(file, "rb") :
> kann komprimierte Datei 
> '/Users/roli/Library/R/2.8/library/maptools/Meta/package.rds' nicht öffnen. 
> Grund evtl. 'Too many open files'
>
> when q() the session console prints again
> … too many open files … and quits.
>
> SessionInfo after restart and reloading packages and data
>
> GUI version is Mac OS X GUI rev. 5372 for R 2.8.x
>
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22)
> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> de_AT.UTF-8/de_AT.UTF-8/C/C/de_AT.UTF-8/de_AT.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
> other attached packages:
> [1] maptools_0.7-16 foreign_0.8-29  spatstat_1.14-9 deldir_0.0-7
> [5] gpclib_1.4-2    mgcv_1.4-1.1    rgdal_0.6-7     sp_0.9-32
>
> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
> [1] grid_2.8.1      lattice_0.17-17
>
>
> Any Ideas what will cause that crash?
> Is a matter of my system locale (German in this case).

No.

-- 
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