[daip] Slow starting AIPS

[Eric Greisen]

Volker Heesen wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> I get an error message now and then "TASK HAS NOT BEGUN IN 15.1 SECONDS". Then AIPS has a pause and comes back later. Any idea what may be causing this? It is a Linux 64-bit binary installation on a RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. Many thanks!
> 
> With kind regards,
> 
> Volker Heesen

This is a message that has puzzled us over the years.  The best guess I 
made in 2008 was an issue of memory allocation.  If the task requires a 
fair amount of memory, you may be able to spawn it, but then it waits 
until there is enough memory to begin execution.  AIPS waits "only" 15 
seconds or so and then gives up and resumes normal execution.  (AIPS 
orders a task to start and then pauses for a period of time, then checks 
if the task has started, and loops until either it gets the signal that 
the task has found and taken its adverbs or the loop count limit has 
been exceeded.  Run top or other machine usage programs in another xterm 
to see how crowded your machine seems to be.

We have not seen that message in quite a while - but then my machine now 
has 24 giga bytes of RAM.

If the task that does not start is some private version of a task, it is 
always possible that it dies before it gets into sufficient action that 
it can fetch the adverbs.

Eric Greisen