st: general debugging question

[Jeph Herrin <stata@spandrel.net>]

All,

I'm running Stata 12.1 on a Win7 64b machine (among others). I have -do- file which takes about 12 hours to run;
it grinds through a large database, creating ~1600 reports each consisting of plain text written out with -file-
statements and some Stata graphs exported as -wmf- files.

The problem is that on every occasion that I have run this -do- file, Stata has stopped after about 600-800
reports. It does not give an error - in fact, it simply hangs up, and does not respond to any input, and has to be
shut down via killing the process. Because of this, I have no idea why the program has hung - I can delete the
most recent report, restart, and it finishes everything fine. The machine is not connected to the internet and
does no automatic updating etc, and, while one can never tell with Windoze, it doesn't seem to matter what time
of day I run it. Running reports for a small sample (anywhere from 1 to 100) has never produced the problem.

This is a nusiance, especially as I would like to run this overnight so that I might use the machine for other things 
during the day. I have tried various tricks to try to trap the problem. However, none work, because it seems to be
the Stata kernel that halts. First question: is there some way to find out what is happening?

The machine has 24gb RAM, but I still suspect that with the many graphs and -file write- statements, some buffer or
other is overflowing. So second question: are there some buffers I can clear within the loop that might resolve
the problem?


Thanks for any suggestions,

Jeph
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