Re: st: general debugging question

[Christopher Zbrozek <zbrozek@gmail.com>]

Hi Jeph,

Are you closing your file handles (file close) and dropping your
graphs from memory (graph drop) when you're done creating the
corresponding output file/graph? I could see the Stata executable
getting cranky if it has hundreds of file handles open or hundreds of
graphs in memory, because those are unusual use cases and it's quite
possible the executable's not designed to handle that.

Best,
Christopher Zbrozek

On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 1:18 PM, Jeph Herrin <stata@spandrel.net> wrote:
>
> 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
> *
> *   For searches and help try:
> *   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
> *   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
> *   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/
*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/resources/statalist-faq/
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/