Re: calling call_external MANY times

["Justin Ashmall" <Justin_Ashmall(at)hotmail.com>]

I had a similar-ish problem some time back (fixed in IDL by now?), my
trouble was that the function name I was calling from IDL was not exactly
the same as that exported in the dll (I think I had the first letter
capitalised by mistake). IDL would still call the function but would keep
reloading it into memory.
However, as far as I remember you could see the memory usage increase until
the machine fell over, unlike your situation.

On a vaguely related point, we were recently using IDL to run a month-long
set of calibrations where IDL was pretty much being thrashed 24 hours a day.
There appeared to be a memory leak in IDL (5.1) so that we had to
periodically restart the machine - after a while we discovered the
increasing memory usage didn't occur if we just left IDL running and didn't
interact with the widget GUI front-end. If we started clicking on buttons
and producing graphs the memory leak would run away. It didn't appear to a
programming problem since the memory would not be released when IDL was
closed down. We would have to restart the computer...

Justin

> I am having to call a C++ dll as many as 14000 times.  The call_external
> routine works for the first 1700 or so times, and then crashes the
> machine.  I have run a resource meter while the IDL program was running,
> and it showed constant memory usage, even at the point when windoze
> crashes, so obviously it is not a memory problem.