[Mesa-users] rates confusion and soul searching

[Aaron Dotter]

Hi folks,

I'm having one of those Heisenbug days, where I just can't figure out what
I'm doing wrong.  Hoping that some can point me in a productive direction.
I'm running a model that I've recently run successfully, where "success" is
defined as making it through core H-burning without any reties or backups
in about 1000 timesteps.  Using rev 11701 with the 20190830 SDK, gfortran
9.2.0.

I'm using pp_and_cno_extras.net with JINA rates (new_rates_preference=2) in
a low-mass star (0.7 Msun) starting from the pre-main sequence.  Normally
this cruises through core H-burning without issue.  Today it grinds to a
halt, evolutionarily-speaking, when the core T goes above ~10^7 K (logdt <
0) and starts doing lots of retries.  I'm also using
set_initial_xa_from_file to set the initial abundances for all species in
the inlist -- this has caused some surprises in the past (looking at
boron-8 here).

I don't have a MWE at the moment but if this drags on into tomorrow, I'll
make one.

When the run starts, before listing the rate cache files written by MESA, I
get these two lines printed to the terminal, over and over again maybe
hundreds of times:

r_ne18_wk_f18 failed in do_jina_reaclib     321
r_ne19_wk_f19 failed in do_jina_reaclib     324

I've tried removing/cleaning caches (data/rates_data/cache, my
MESA_CACHES_DIR, and .mesa_temp_cache in my work directory).  This doesn't
fix the problem.

If I switch to NACRE (new_rates_preference=1 then the model evolves as I
would like it to.  This and the error message make me think I've run afoul
of some weird rates problem.

If confronted with this problem, what would you try next?

Thanks!
Aaron
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