[R-SIG-Mac] mclapply THE_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED error

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 11:09 AM, Florian Oswald
<florian.oswald at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have got a question regarding the multicore package, used on a macbook
> pro with 4 cores. I have code that can be split into 2 independent pieces,
> such that I call
>
> result <- mclapply(1:2, function(x) myfun(x) )
>
> It works perfectly - most of the time. Sometimes I get this error message:
>
> Break on
> __THE_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED_AND_YOU_CANNOT_USE_THIS_COREFOUNDATION_FUNCTIONALITY___YOU_MUST_EXEC__()
> to debug.
>
> This happens particularly after I called mclapply over and over again in
> the same session. I have a suspicion that some forked processes are not
> properly terminated after the function exits (I can see them in the
> activity monitor). Notice I do not change option mc.cleanup (i.e. it's at
> default TRUE).
>
> I imagine a source of error is myfun (too big to paste here) - the only
> thing I can say is that it runs without problem in lapply.
>
> My biggest concern is that I want to run this function on a unix cluster.
> I'm not sure if what I'm saying makes a lot of sense but I want to make
> sure that I don't accumulate many idle R processes and run into that
> problem.

Does this problem only happen when you are running R through R.app? I
mean, if you fire up R from the terminal with `R --vanilla`, then try
your stuff again, do you see it happen?

Other things to look out for: is there plotting code in `myfun`?

-steve

--
Steve Lianoglou
Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Genentech