A problem existed in midas for some time: when recording long data sets of time (or event) limited runs 
with logger run auto restart set to "yes", the runs will automatically stop and restart as expected, but 
sometimes the run will stop and never restart and beam will be lost until the experiment operator on shift 
wakes up and restarts the run manually.

I have now traced this problem to a race condition inside the mlogger - when a run is being stopped from 
the mlogger, the mlogger run transition handler (tr_stop) triggers an immediate attempt to start the next 
run, without waiting for the run-stop transition to actually complete. If the run-stop transition does not 
finish quickly enough, a safety check in start_the_run() will cause the run restart attempt to silently fail 
without any error message.

This race condition is pretty rare but somehow I managed to replicate it while debugging the 
multithreaded transitions. It is fixed by making mlogger wait until the run-stop transition completes.

https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/b2631fbed5f7b1ec80e8a6c8781ada0baed7702b

K.O.