Bugs in WU BLAST 1.4

o Reliability of the Solaris threads support for parallel processing is only
marginally questionable.  Previous bugs involving Solaris threads seem to have
been fixed, as the Solaris versions have been beaten upon extensively without
crashing due to the Alarm clock error.  In your hands, if the programs should
abort their search with an "Alarm clock" message, please let me know and please
make sure that you compiled all of the code involved -- from the NCBI Toolbox
all the way through the blastapp programs -- with the -mt option of the SunSoft
C compiler.  Or just grab the precompiled Solaris executables from this
site.  Alarm clock aborts can be avoided altogether by specifying the
"progress=0" option, which disables the feature responsible for outputting
splats ("*") once every minute during long searches.

Also make sure your version of Solaris is fully patched -- particularly with
threads-related patches; and if you're running a version of Solaris earlier
than 2.5 or 2.5.1, consider upgrading.

Please send bug reports to:  gish *AT* watson.wustl.edu

Warren Gish
Dept. of Genetics
Washington University School of Medicine
4444 Forest Park Ave., Campus Box 8501
St. Louis, MO 63108