Prime lags after extensive processing

[Angus]

I am sure that very few people involved in software development and/or embedded systems design have never found themselfes in a situation to gain the strong feeling that there 'is something' going wrong. That can happen before launch or -sadly- after a launch. I would not blame HP for such bugs (in contrast to task priorisations and implementation details). That is just how our business works.
Simply adopting pc software to a smaller embedded machine like the prime is more likely to cause trouble...

Such a situation is frustrating for both customer and producer. In your case the problem seems to be that HP is not aware of problems with their memory managment (officially at least). So keeping patient and provide further information is the only thing you can do. HP, however, should and will at least consider that some part of memory managment is buggy.
But if the calculator lets you do certain calculations and create datasets is HAS to deal with them correctly. I think everyone will agree on that.
I don't know if a more underemployed calculator will suffer from these lags and memory corruptions sooner or later. If there is no working memory cleaning or recovery mechanism this could become the nightmare of a student.

About a broken prime: in addition to HP did other users try run your code on their machines? Is it happening there, too?
Personally I am sure that Tim will not ignore that phenomenon. But if you know little and have no real idea where to look the way to solving the problem is a hard one. :-(

Quote:Ram and CPU don't break. They either work or they do not. There is no middle ground that causes issues.

There is at least one cenario when this is not 100% true. Imagine poor bus timings. (I do not expect this to be existant don't get me wrong. Would happen way more often anyways) Then the ram could work or could not work if the machine gets busy. i.e. gets hot. Even ics from different factories or production dates might differ in their timing tolerances and work with the given host interface or fail.
Your statement seems to be logical, but it could be wrong. And if you don't consider that you will never find the issue. Happened to me once.

Quote:I have not seen your program, but my first guess is that you are not using the most efficient ways to deal with your very large dataset.

I think if there are inefficient ways that have to be avoided you should point these out. That is more like an implementaion specific thing and has little to do with general programming. How should one know.