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Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior [message #39568 is a reply to message #39489]

Fri, 28 May 2004 12:34

Marc R. Reinig
Messages: 6
Registered: May 2004

Junior Member

Another thought is that Windows can be slow in freeing memory and
resources after a program executes. If there are a lot of scattered
objects it may take it a while and reduce the amount available for a
second running of your program. I haven't seen this impact other
Windows programs, so I doubt it is the sole reason, but it might be a
contributing reason.

Also, I don't know how IDL works internally, but since it seems to
handle resources for the programs itself, it may be slow in releasing
things. All it takes is for a single reference to an object to keep it
in memory and unavailable to others.

However, the fact that, if you open a window (and I gather that would be
a Windows window as opposed to an IDL window) the problem goes away,
would tend to point to a Windows issue, since opening a window would
kick off a lot of cleanup activity, if there weren't enough resources
available (as opposed to putting the clean up in the background).

Programs will often request a resource, such as memory, but not check to
see if they really got it, then attempt to use it. Windows will
periodically fail requests for resources for various reasons. Programs
are supposed to check for this and handle things gracefully, like
retrying after a brief interval or issuing a message to the user. I
write drivers and it is necessary to handle these cases because they do
happen and when a driver doesn't handle things like this you usually see
a blue screen. Fortunately, user programs usually just die without
killing the whole system, if they don't handle things right.

You might look at the resources usage in the task manager and see if
this is what is happening.

Marc Reinig
Laboratory for Adaptive Optics
UCO, Lick Observatory

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[Message index]

		Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: David Fanning on Sun, 23 May 2004 11:15
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: Nigel Wade on Wed, 26 May 2004 02:07
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: Rick Towler on Wed, 26 May 2004 08:24
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: David Fanning on Tue, 25 May 2004 10:54
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: Rick Towler on Tue, 25 May 2004 10:40
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: Marc R. Reinig on Fri, 28 May 2004 12:34
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: Marc R. Reinig on Wed, 26 May 2004 11:25
		Re: Extremely Strange Program Behavior By: David Fanning on Wed, 26 May 2004 10:23

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