Re: Lilypond crashes while drawing systems

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

> > I seem to have managed to create a Lilypond file that crashes my
> > system (Linux Mint 64-Bit with kernel 4.4.0-98-generic) so hard that I
> > have to shut it down using the power button. Even a bash script in
> > background that kills the Lilypond process every few seconds cannot
> > rescue reliably. :-( The system hangs while "Drawing systems"
> > ("Systeme erstellen" on my pc).
> That sounds like exploding memory usage.  Try using the ulimit command
> for limiting the memory usage per process to something quite lower than
> your physical memory and have some swap space available so that dormant
> processes can be temporarily moved out, not contributing to the memory
> pressure that much.
Thanks for pointing me to ulimit. This enabled me to safely strip down 
the example to a minimal one. With ulimit -Sv 5000000, Lilypond thinks 
for a while during "drawing systems" and then aborts with a std::bad_alloc.)

This kind-of-minimal version crashes 2.19.80 as well as current master:

\version "2.19.80"

\new Staff <<
  {
    \clef bass
    e,4
  }
  {
    \omit NoteHead
    e,4
  }
>>

Everything here (except the \version) seems to be necessary. I can 
reproduce the crash with some other configurations as well (another 
pitch in tenor clef, for instance), but removing any single command 
seems to resolve the problem. Also, putting each "voice" into a regular 
\new Voice (as in Harm's proposal) makes the problem disappear. Just as  
taking f, instead of e, for the pitch does (which could point to ledger 
lines).

Best
Lukas