[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #34631] MinGW + MSVC - fubarred Octave 3.4.+ after many plots

[anonymous]

Follow-up Comment #10, bug #34631 (project octave):

I ran into this problem today and looked into it a little bit.  The proximate
cause of the problem is that Octave is filling up all its available open
filehandles with fonts (the usual C/Windows limit seems to be about 512 open
files), leaving no slots available for opening other files (such as M-files,
e.g. when you try to close the figure or perform any other non-builtin
operation).  Creating an axis keeps six font filehandles open, and each text()
command keeps one filehandle open.  These numbers explain Nitzan's empirical
limits (symptom 1: one axis + 504 text ~ 510 handles; symptom 2: 86 axes ~ 516
handles).

Closing or clearing the figure (before exhausting the filehandle table) does
close the filehandles, which is good: it looks like there's not a handle leak,
just excessive usage.  It seems like the obvious solution is to simply close
the font file after use rather than keep it open; but I don't know enough to
know whether there's a good reason to keep the handles open for the lifetime
of the figure.

[I monitored filehandle usage using SysInternals Process Explorer.  You can
watch the number of open handles rising as you execute one of these text-heavy
loops (you can do this with Task Manager too; select "Handle Count" as a
column), and by viewing all handles for the Octave process you can see that
most of them are to arial.ttf (or whatever your default font is). 
Force-closing the handles makes Octave complain if you try to resize the axes,
which is not too surprising.]

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34631>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via/by Savannah
  http://savannah.gnu.org/