I'm writing an app in which the user incrementally adds vertices to the graph; of course it starts empty, and after each addition the graph is laid out with the fruchterman-reingold function. The algorithm copes well with empty graphs, but once I add a single vertex, the program crashes: the crash is always in the same place, deep in std::list but called from boost/graph/fruchterman_reingold.hpp:116 : buckets[row * columns + column].push_back(*v); The push_back function calls end() to get the last element of the list, and fails. A bit of gdb turned up the following result: columns and rows were both being set to 0 and so buckets was also of size 0. Lines 111:112 also end up setting column and row to 0, and then the next pair of lines were setting them to, on my machine, 4G. The element of buckets being accessed, then, was ridiculously out of bounds. The value width/two_k, once cast to the integral size_t, was always zero. I don't think this is restricted to having a single vertex in the graph, but that case seems to exacerbate the bug. So as a workaround, I've added the following two lines to make sure that the variables columns and rows are at least 1: Index: boost/graph/fruchterman_reingold.hpp =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/boost/boost/boost/graph/fruchterman_reingold.hpp,v retrieving revision 1.5 diff -u -r1.5 fruchterman_reingold.hpp --- boost/graph/fruchterman_reingold.hpp 29 Dec 2004 16:53:05 -0000 1.5 +++ boost/graph/fruchterman_reingold.hpp 13 Jan 2005 13:09:00 -0000 @@ -105,6 +105,8 @@ std::size_t columns = std::size_t(width / two_k); std::size_t rows = std::size_t(height / two_k); + if (columns == 0) columns = 1; + if (rows == 0) rows = 1; buckets_t buckets(rows * columns); vertex_iterator v, v_end; for (tie(v, v_end) = vertices(g); v != v_end; ++v) { If you wish to reproduce this bug, you can do so with the example program libs/graph/example/fr_layout.cpp : g++ -Iboost boost/libs/graph/example/fr_layout.cpp echo "A B" | ./a.out 100 100 My results without the patched function: willow% echo "A B" | ./a.out 100 100 0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100% |----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----| *zsh: done echo "A B" | zsh: segmentation fault ./a.out 100 100 and patched: willow% echo "A B" | ./a.out 100 100 0% 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100% |----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----| *************************************************** A -41.0322 -29.471 B 1.16969 27.1354