After running for some time maps tends to get bogged down searching for the "best structure" (for hours at a time). Because mapsrep says maps has new predicted ground states, I would like to urge it to go ahead and test these, because otherwise the computer will sit idly waiting for maps’ decision. Is there some way to do this?
My answer below does not directly answer your request, but improves maps’ responsiveness, so your problem may become less of an issue.
Usually, the predicted ground state you see are for the previous step of the cluster expansion construction and maps is working on incorporating new information (so the data in predstr.out may be obsolete). This usually does not take too long, except when maps gets to the next cell size. I have tried to improve that step (so that maps doesn’t generate all structures of a given volume, but only a small faction, as needed), see
https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Engineering/Labs/avdw/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=12#p19
Another thing that helps is to set the -c=?? option to a large number (>3) to penalize the exploration of large-cell structures.
I should also mention that if there are predicted ground states, maps should not be generating new structures, it will first try to resolve the problem with the structures already generated, so if you see it "hang" (presumably generating structures) it probably already has already ruled out some predicted ground states.