Hello Sowmya,
From the errors at the bottom of the screenshot, it looks like the processes are failing due to insufficient memory. (“error: Cannot allocate memory”)
It also looks like the recons are being run via the ‘reconbatchjobs’ utility, but I might be incorrect about that.
I would suggest running the recons on a machine with more RAM, and/or running the jobs in sequence rather than parallel, so the jobs are not competing for resources.
Best,
Jackson
From:
Sambamoorthy, Sowmya <Sowmya.Sambamoorthy@UTDallas.edu>
Date: Wednesday, September 17, 2025 at 3:38 PM
To: freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu <freesurfer@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu>
Cc: Kidwai, Ambereen <Amber.Kidwai@utdallas.edu>
Subject: [Freesurfer] Recon failing: normal vector of length zero at vertex NNNNN with N faces
External Email - Use Caution
Hello!
Need help getting past these errors (attached recon log) for reference. Many of my brains are throwing errors like below:
“normal vector of length zero at vertex 101440 with 6 faces
first tangent vector of length zero at vertex 101440”
Last few lines of recon.log below:

Any help appreciated!
Thank you in advance for your support.
--Sowmya