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Strange notebook problems

I have a notebook that I've been working with for days and suddenly this morning it is "failing silently" for lack of a better description after one of the cells. When I try and run the plotting cells, it hangs and if I click play again the counter goes back to 1 and it complains about libraries not being imported.

Does anyone have any ideas? I've tried making a copy, reloading the notebook, the kernel, the browser, etc. all to no avail.

8 responses

Hi Rob,

We recently changed the way we reclaim memory from idle notebooks. It sounds like we might have been a little too aggressive here. Currently, if a notebook is left idle for over an hour, the kernel will be stopped. Our team will look into tweaking the configuration to accommodate longer delays between cell executions.

Ian

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Rob - one aspect of the problem you're having that confuses me is that you said you reloaded the notebook and got errors. That shouldn't be the case. Once your notebook kernel reloads, you should be able to execute again starting on the first cell. Can you provide more details?

@Ian Ok, quick update. It seems to be related to a specific module (scipy.cluster.hierarchy). If I try to display the seaborn clustermap, it borks the whole notebook. If I skip that cell and do the rest of the plots, it works perfectly. It was definitely working all weekend also.

One additional note: this is not a memory or timeout problem as far as I can tell. Research memory is at 15%. I just tried TW's hierarchical risk parity notebook and no go either. Not sure what to make of this, could the library be damaged or something?

Thanks for the update, Rob. I just checked and your notebook server hasn't been affected by the timeout (I see it's been up for ~3 days). It sounds like you're affected by a different platform issue. I'll bring it up to the rest of engineering.

Failed to start the kernel

'_xsrf' argument missing from POST

get above on old notebooks I already have -- cannot seem to clone anything

Yeah, it might be best termed "phantom notebook restarts".

@Ian Thanks a lot for looking into this!