Server could not re-checkout feature because: Unable to read file

[tfpper]

I've twice had this problem.

I am running atkpython on my local PC connecting to a LAN license server.
After several days of computation I got this error message

Connection to server [ atk.license.eng.unimelb.edu.au : 6200 ] lost - trying to reconnect.
Server could not re-checkout feature because:
Unable to read file

I noticed that on both times, the checkpoint file reached a size of 57,715 kb.

I've asked the network administrator to trouble shoot the problem the first time and the license server log file says

[2012-09-27 09:51:58] USER INACTIVE davng@400D-97989
All other lines say STATUS, CHECKIN or CHECKOUT

[Anders Blom]

Can you correlate the time-stamp for "USER INACTIVE" in the server log to your "connection to server ... lost"?

In a sense it's clear what happens: the client loses the network connection to the server (possibly the server dies), after the server is not back online (or connection not restored) within 5*120 seconds, and at that point ATK gives up.

As for why this happens, there is no real information from the logs or otherwise for me to even guess... Is it possible there is some particular part of the script that takes extremely long to compute?