Re: ncl 6.1.1

Hi all,

I think we have figured out the cause of the problem here. There are actually 2 issues and I am afraid I am responsible for both. My apologies to
anyone affected. Fortunately, as people have noticed, there is an easy fix.

1) During development, I needed for my own purposes to increase the size of the workspace allocated for contour area fill from 1 milliion bytes to
20 million bytes. I did not intend to check this change in, but unfortunately as a single line change it slipped in along with a larger change that was only tangentially related.
Combined with other workspace allocations, this was enough of an increase for a typical contour plot to overshoot the value that we have been recommending for the
wsMaximumSize in the .hluresfile, 32556688 (see http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Document/Graphics/hlures.shtml),

2) In fact the number that we have been recommending for wkMaximumSize is obsolete since quite a while ago I had bumped the default hard-coded value up to 100 million bytes.
This explains why commenting out the *wsMaximumSize value fixes the issue: not setting it the res file gives you a greater value. I should have made a point of updating the res file
documentation at the time, but I did not think to do it. We will make sure this happens very soon now.

So the bottom line is that unless you are creating plots from very high resolution data, the current default value for *wsMaximumSize is probably adequate, and you are better off
not having *wsMaximizeSize set at all in the res file. You certainly should not set it unless you make it bigger than 100 million bytes.
Actually this leads to the question of whether this memory limit is necessary at all. Back in the 90's when NCL was developed memory was more limited and so it may have served a purpose,
but now this resource is probably obsolete. I have set it as high as 2GB in the res file with no bad effects.

After some discussion we have decided that we are going to a quick 6.1.2 release. There are a couple of other issues that we will address as well. This will be available in a couple of days we think.
 -dave

On Feb 6, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Mary Haley wrote:

> Folks,
>
> Rick determined that the problem seems to be if you have a "wsMaximumSize" setting in your .hluresfile.
>
> For example, if you have something like:
>
> *wsMaximumSize: 32556688
>
> then you will likely see this problem for any NCL script that creates a contour plot. Note that it
> doesn't occur for *all* contour scripts. We are looking into this.
>
> A possible work-around is to comment out or remove this setting, if you don't need it, or to increase the size.
>
> I was able to increase it to this value, and have the errors in our tests go away:
>
> *wsMaximumSize: 100000000
>
> We will likely do another release quickly, if we determine this is a show-stopper bug.
>
> --Mary
>
>
> On Feb 6, 2013, at 8:50 AM, Mary Haley wrote:
>
>> Hi Don and Oscar,
>>
>> Sorry about the problems! I didn't run into this problem with the graphics tests that
>> I ran. I don't have a MacOS 10.8 system, but I did run the graphics on
>> several Linux systems. I will try the tests again with PNG output to see if
>> there's a difference.
>>
>> Meanwhile, can one of you provide me with a sample script and data so we can
>> test it here? You can use our ftp site:
>>
>> http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/report_bug.shtml#HowToFTP
>>
>> I may be able to provide a work-around once I see a sample script.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --Mary
>>
>> On Feb 6, 2013, at 7:26 AM, Don Murray (NOAA Affiliate) wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Oscar-
>>>
>>> On 2/6/13 6:39 AM, Oscar Chimborazo wrote:
>>>> I installed the new ncl-6.1.1 and I tried to run a script that worked
>>>> perfectly with ncl-6.1.0, but now with the new version I got this:
>>>>
>>>> fatal:_NhlUseWorkspace: Allocation of workspace would exceed maximum
>>>> total size
>>>> fatal:ContourPlotDraw: error reserving label area map workspace
>>>> fatal:ContourPlotDraw: Error reserving workspace
>>>> fatal:ContourPlotDraw: draw error
>>>> warning:WorkstationDeactivate: workstation not active or not opened
>>>>
>>>> Does anybody have something similar?
>>>>
>>>> My machine is a Mac x86_64 with OSX 10.8.2.
>>>
>>> I'm seeing the same thing on Linux using the PNG driver on a script that
>>> worked fine on 5.2, 6.0 and 6.1.0.
>>>
>>> Don
>>> --
>>> Don Murray
>>> NOAA/ESRL/PSD and CIRES
>>> 303-497-3596
>>> http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/don.murray/
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ncl-talk mailing list
>>> List instructions, subscriber options, unsubscribe:
>>> http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ncl-talk mailing list
>> List instructions, subscriber options, unsubscribe:
>> http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk
>
> _______________________________________________
> ncl-talk mailing list
> List instructions, subscriber options, unsubscribe:
> http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk

_______________________________________________
ncl-talk mailing list
List instructions, subscriber options, unsubscribe:
http://mailman.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/ncl-talk
Received on Wed Feb 6 14:13:06 2013