Dynamic freeze
Andrzej Kozlowski
(e.g. a Mathematica demonstration) Mathematica appears to freeze, and
then the following message appears:
One or more dynamic objects are taking excessively long to finish
evaluating. You may either disable further dynamic evaluations or
continue waiting. Dynamic updating can be re-enabled using the Dynamic
Updating Enabled command in the Evaluation menu.
All very well, except that my experience has taught me that this
situation is (almost?) always equivalent (from the user point of view
anyway) to a Front End Crash. Clicking the "Continue" button seems to
guarantee that the same dialog will return after a further period of
apparent freeze. Clicking on "Disable Dynamic Updating" is usually
impossible and in fact I am not sure if I have ever succeeded in
getting out of this sort of situation without having to Force Quit
Mathematica.
What's more worrying is that this sort of thing happens with perfectly
good notebooks containing no errors of any kind, including
demonstrations downloaded from the Demonstrations site. It only
happens from time to time, fortunately not very often, but I have not
been able to discover any reproducible way to arrive at this
situation. It looks like it depends on the internal state of
Mathematica rather than on the contents of the notebook.
I am experiencing this now with version 7.01 under Mac OS X, 10.5.7,
but I think the same thing used to happen in every version since
version 6 and Mac OS X.
Andrzej Kozlowski
David Bailey
now so complicated, because of Dynamic, that it is no longer very stable :(
One way of rescuing the FE (at least most times), that I have
discovered, is to use a system command (e.g. task Manager under Windows)
to kill the kernel process - don't try to do this from the FE. The
system usually seems to hiccup a bit, but recovers, which can be
important if you have unsaved work!
David Bailey
http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk