Intermittent "ifort: error: could not checkout FLEXlm license" aborts.

[carsten_koch]

We are running large scons-controlled builds at night with thousands of fortran compilations. Occassionally (around one out of every 10000), one of them fails with the message:

"ifort: error: could not checkout FLEXlm license"

and no other information.

Here is a piece of the log before and after the error:

ifort /nologo /assume:dummy_aliases /assume:underscore /fpscomp:logicals /iface:nomixed_str_len_arg /iface:cref /names:lowercase /threads /Zi /Od /dll /reentrancy:threaded /define:Ic_WINDOWS_NT_SHARED /include:"U:allusersupport	runk.164.01includesMath" /include:"surfftni" /debug:full /nopdbfile /c surfGeometrygtexpa.F /object:scons_build_dirdebug32dynwin32surfGeometrygtexpa.obj
ifort /nologo /assume:dummy_aliases /assume:underscore /fpscomp:logicals /iface:nomixed_str_len_arg /iface:cref /names:lowercase /threads /Zi /Od /dll /reentrancy:threaded /define:Ic_WINDOWS_NT_SHARED /include:"U:allusersupport	runk.164.01includesMath" /include:"surfftni" /debug:full /nopdbfile /c surfGeometrygtexsa.F /object:scons_build_dirdebug32dynwin32surfGeometrygtexsa.obj
ifort: error: could not checkout FLEXlm license
ifort /nologo /assume:dummy_aliases /assume:underscore /fpscomp:logicals /iface:nomixed_str_len_arg /iface:cref /names:lowercase /threads /Zi /Od /dll /reentrancy:threaded /define:Ic_WINDOWS_NT_SHARED /include:"U:allusersupport	runk.164.01includesMath" /include:"surfftni" /debug:full /nopdbfile /c surfGeometrygticpa.F /object:scons_build_dirdebug32dynwin32surfGeometrygticpa.obj
ifort /nologo /assume:dummy_aliases /assume:underscore /fpscomp:logicals /iface:nomixed_str_len_arg /iface:cref /names:lowercase /threads /Zi /Od /dll /reentrancy:threaded /define:Ic_WINDOWS_NT_SHARED /include:"U:allusersupport	runk.164.01includesMath" /include:"surfftni" /debug:full /nopdbfile /c surfGeometrygticsa.F /object:scons_build_dirdebug32dynwin32surfGeometrygticsa.obj

...

LIB : fatal error LNK1181: cannot open input file 'scons_build_dirdebug32dynwin32surfGeometrygtexsa.obj'

There were a total of 1728 ifort calls in this build, the 1325 before the error and the 402 after the error were OK. The sysop informed me that the license server is in a local network with the build machine, was up during the entire build and has no error message in its log around the time of the error. They suggest that I write a wrapper script around the compiler that checks for this error and keeps restarting the compiler when the error occurs.

Is this a known error?
Is there really no solution, so I have to write the crazy wrapper?

Thanks and Cheers,
Carsten.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

This is not a known problem. Unfortunately, the compiler does not wait for a license nor does it retry on a failure.

An option I sometimes suggest to customers who have similr environments is to add to the license server a FLEXlm options file specifying a LINGER time of 120 seconds. This means that the license is held by the same "user" for two minutes after the last successful compile, making it likely that your batch build will complete. See the FLEXlm User's Guide for information.