Sometimes Maxima commands can take some time, e.g. VTK graphics commands. If the response of Maxima does not appear within a currently very short timeout threshold, Maxima kills the currently running process and restarts a new one.
This was meant to avoid blocking SMath by hanging Maxima processes.
It, however, prevents usage of more complex Maxima commands and prevents examining the log file (this is reset upon restart).
Proposal: accept the keyword "wait" as string or name as a second argument in Maxima(). If this argument is present, no restart is tried. Possibly restart can be triggered manually by pressing the stop button (interrupt calculation)