reached CPU time limit error about arules

[mhahsler]

What is the exact error message? Yours sounds like someone used setTimeLimit(). arules does not set this because it only applies to top-level computations.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17819790/reached-cpu-time-limit-in-r

[kliegr]

I am not myself calling setTimeLimit(), but I am wrapping arules into evalWithTimeout() (I am aware of the new maxtime parameter), which might be doing that or something similar.

Before I updated R (arules, but also some other packages) exceeding time limit set in evalWithTimeout always produced only the TimeoutException, which is the correct exception according to the evalWithTimeout doc.

Now, I am getting mostly this new exception of class "simpleError", and only scarcely the TimeoutException. The exact message (err$message) of the new "simpleError" exception is "reached CPU time limit".

I already have a workaround/error handler for the new exception type, and as you write, this problem is likely unrelated to changes in arules. It may be caused by some other update in my R installation, possibly the error might be also somewhere on my side. It is nothing important.

[mhahsler]

Maybe the developer of R.util has changed something in withTimeout(). It looks like you can specify if it throws an error when a timeout happens. However, the timeout does not work for the actual apriori call (since it uses C code). This is why I have introduced the new maxtime parameter.