[Openmcl-devel] Modal dialog problems with CCL 1.9 32/64 on Mountain Lion

[R. Matthew Emerson]

On Aug 29, 2012, at 7:04 PM, Alexander Repenning <Alexander.Repenning at colorado.edu> wrote:

> I think I have here a pretty Kosher (uses retain, does not use depreciated functions) version of the dialog + memory surge problem. This version of choose-file-dialog is completely stripped of any non essential activity. It does not even return the path, i.e., there is no practical value to this function.
> 
> Please have a go and see if you can or cannot experience that Memory surge phenomenon. Please follow the instructions closely. Otherwise you may miss the issues at sometimes can be kind subtle. 

> ;; CCL 1.8.1 64 (Mac App store) crash on Mountain Lion 10.8.1

The version of CCL in the Mac App Store still contains a bug in it that Mountain Lion triggers.  I am pretty sure that your test case is running into that bug.

Gary mentioned this bug in a previous message:

- there's a known bug in 64-bit CCL on OSX that can cause lisp thread creation
  to go into a horrible CPU-burning/memory-thrashing state.  I think that that
  bug's been present for a long time (since PPC64 days), but it's apparently
  much easier to trigger on 10.8 (and/or recent versions of CCL) than it has been.
  The problem ultimately has to do with whether or not #_malloc (actually #_calloc)
  returns a 64-bit pointer whose high 32 bits are 0 and there can be many factors
  that affect that (many of them subtle), and the fix is to stop assuming that
  it does and allocate such pointers ourselves.

  That's been fixed (in the trunk for a few weeks and in the 1.8 tree
  for a few days) in svn; the symptoms happen to be very similar to
  what people have reported seeing with CHOOSE-FILE-DIALOG, but the
  CHOOSE-FILE-DIALOG problems seem to occur for at least some people
  in 32-bit CCL (which was never affected by this thread-creation
  problem) and in freshly-updated 64-bit versions.

The fix for this bug is not yet in the Mac App Store version of CCL.  I'll try to update the Mac App Store version soon, but in the meantime, please try using up-to-date CCL obtained via Subversion (either trunk or 1.8).

I modified your test case to make the call to the open panel take place in the main thread.  It seemed to work as expected for me in an up-to-date trunk CCL.

;; modified to use gui:execute-in-gui
(defun THE-AMAZING-MEMORY-SURGE ()
  (dotimes (i 100)
    (gui:execute-in-gui #'(lambda ()
                            (choose-file-dialog2)))
    (ccl::process-run-function "pretent to load project"  #'(lambda ()))))



> 
> 
> (defun choose-file-dialog2 ()
>   ;; 100% kosher: retain, no use of depreciated calls
>   (let ((panel (#/retain (#/openPanel ns:ns-open-panel))))
>     (#/runModal panel)
>     (#/release panel)))
> 
> 
> (defun THE-AMAZING-MEMORY-SURGE ()
>   (dotimes (i 100)
>     (ccl::with-autorelease-pool
>         (choose-file-dialog2)
>       (ccl::process-run-function "pretent to load project"  #'(lambda () )))))
> 
> 
> ;; this will pop up a file chooser for a number of times. Each time just press ESC and watch the Activity Monitor. 
> ;; Set view > update frequency in Actvity Monitor to very often (0.5s) for best results
> ;; Watch out for Clozure CL % CPU and Real Mem
> ;; for some time Real Mem will go up gradually (memory leak) then at some unpredicatable time it will SURGE to GIGABITES of memory and ultimately crash CCL
> ;; with with-autorelease-pool CCL may crash quite quickly with a Unhandled exception 10, comment out if needed
> 
> ; (the-amazing-memory-surge)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.clozure.com/pipermail/openmcl-devel/attachments/20120829/af527f2b/attachment.htm>