MARK crashes - bug?

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MARK crashes - bug?

Postby Morten Frederiksen » Wed Jun 03, 2015 8:25 am

I've just installed the most recent version of MARK (8.0) downloaded today (3 June 2015) from http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/~gwhite/ ... ownloading

When I try to start the program, it crashes immediately and I get an error message:
Error Code: 11 [ ]
Subsystem: BASE
Description: Dynamic Memory Low
CallStack:
APP:START (Line: 17)
START (Line:6)

Any idea what this means, and what I can do to avoid it? I use Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit on an i7 CPU with 16 GB RAM (so memory is not an issue).

Morten
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby cooch » Wed Jun 03, 2015 8:52 am

Morten Frederiksen wrote:I've just installed the most recent version of MARK (8.0) downloaded today (3 June 2015) from http://warnercnr.colostate.edu/~gwhite/ ... ownloading

When I try to start the program, it crashes immediately and I get an error message:
Error Code: 11 [ ]
Subsystem: BASE
Description: Dynamic Memory Low
CallStack:
APP:START (Line: 17)
START (Line:6)

Any idea what this means, and what I can do to avoid it? I use Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit on an i7 CPU with 16 GB RAM (so memory is not an issue).

Morten


No idea off-hand - I have a similar Win 7 config, and have no problems on my end.

Might try uninstalling, then re-installing using the version found here:

http://www.phidot.org/software/mark/dow ... /setup.exe

In theory, this is an identical, mirrored copy of the version on the CSU site, but you never know.
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby jhines » Thu Jun 04, 2015 8:29 am

I just tried the new version and had no trouble. One 'shot in the dark' suggestion: make sure no MS apps (Word, Excel,...) are running when you start it. I've seen a couple of cases where those apps cause some sort of strange conflict with other software.
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby Morten Frederiksen » Mon Jun 08, 2015 2:32 am

Thanks Jim, that appears to be the right track. MARK refuses to start if I have both Word and Excel running ... otherwise no problem. I may have to do some more experiments to explore under which conditions this crash occurs.

Morten
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby cooch » Mon Jun 08, 2015 11:57 am

Morten Frederiksen wrote:Thanks Jim, that appears to be the right track. MARK refuses to start if I have both Word and Excel running ... otherwise no problem. I may have to do some more experiments to explore under which conditions this crash occurs.

Morten


nah, don't buy it. I just tried opening *all* of the Office 2013 applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint,...), and MARK opens fine. I also tried a random assortment of various large, memory-hogging applications (SAS, R -- when you're inverting 5,000x5,000 matrices, say), and so forth -- not a problem opening MARK.

Must be something else. My guess is -- tweaky driver. You can test this by temporarily turning off all except Microsoft services (if you don't know how, then this isn't something you want to play with), fire up office, and then trying MARK. If it works, then its some flaky driver.
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby AdamC » Wed Jan 20, 2016 4:51 pm

I would like to add some additional information regarding this bug. We have three computers in the office that previously ran the most recent version of Mark without issue. Each computer would start Mark, run models, produce output, etc.. Then we gradually shifted over to doing most of our Mark work in RMark (using RStudio) and one by one, the computers fell to this bug. RMark continues to work fine. It's just when we try to start the GUI that we experience the crash and see the error message. We've tried a clean uninstall/reinstall with no luck.

My hypothesis:
It seems the GUI is running memory check on startup but is looking at a log file that doesn't actually reflect the current conditions on the machine. Once the file logs low dynamic memory, the switch is flipped and Mark only ever sees that. Reinstalling Mark doesn't fix the problem because it doesn't reset this log file. RMark facilitates this "switch flipping" because it makes it easy to run 1000 models back to back, and that's where our problem arose. Does this intuition make sense?

Another possibility is that a system update in the last 6 months broke Mark on our computers... This bug has been reported at least as far back as 2010 without solution; it's clearly tricky to reproduce so I kind of doubt Windows update is the issue.

Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby jlaake » Wed Jan 20, 2016 6:22 pm

Oh that's a worm I created that never let's you go back to the GUI once you start using RMark :P

I'm not sure about your "flipping" logic with regard to RMark. RMark only uses mark32.exe or mark64.exe and not the interface (GUI) which is markint.exe. If I understand correctly it is the mark GUI interface that is causing the problem. If you ever run into problems running RMark under Rstudio, I suggest that you run it from Rterm or Rgui. I've seen cases where things crash under RStudio but not under regular R interfaces.

--jeff
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby cooch » Wed Jan 20, 2016 6:47 pm

jlaake wrote:...If you ever run into problems running RMark under Rstudio, I suggest that you run it from Rterm or Rgui. I've seen cases where things crash under RStudio but not under regular R interfaces.

--jeff


Absolutely. RStudio has enough attendant 'issues' that a number of faculty here who teach R-laden classes have essentially forbidden students from using it. When in doubt, go minimal....
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby AdamC » Wed Jan 20, 2016 7:48 pm

Ha, yes after settling in with RMark it takes motivation to fire up Mark's GUI. :wink:

But I think I didn't state the problem clearly. RMark is working great. RStudio is working well enough. The problem is that the Mark's GUI no longer starts up (i.e. clicking on "Mark" on my desktop instantly produces an error message without showing any other part of Mark). I hypothesized the link to RMark because that's what we've seen with our computers but it sounds like others in the forum have encountered the same error message but not caused by RMark (e.g. see the comments in the "new MARK build" forum post) . So maybe the connection is purely correlative and not causative.

**Edit: Jeff, after rereading your comment I see that you did understand the situation and that, in addition, you were also offering a suggestion regarding RStudio. Point taken; I frequently consider abandoning RStudio but it keeps me happy enough of the time that I haven't yet.
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Re: MARK crashes - bug?

Postby cooch » Wed Jan 20, 2016 8:22 pm

AdamC wrote:but it sounds like others in the forum have encountered the same error message but not caused by RMark (e.g. see the comments in the "new MARK build" forum post) ....


"others" = <5. In all the years that MARK has been out there, I can count the number of machines the GUI doesn't start on using only one hand. I've personally installed it on (oh) 60-100 machines, with nary a whimper or problem. I'd be willing to bet major $$$ that those *few* individuals having the problem have one or two bits of weirdness on their machines that are hard to track down.
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