Subject: Intermittant fork failure b18, (b15 as well.)
From: [email-masked] (Richard L. Hyde)

20 Feb 1998 20:42:09 -0800
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To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

I have spent quite a while losing in fork.  For some reason my system
started to fail
randomly when forking a new process.  Most of the time I get an annoying
windoz dialog box stating, "The application failed to initialize
properly (0xc0000043). Click on OK to terminate the application"

Then in the shell window one of the following occurs
    fork_helper: child died before initialization with win32 error 128
    too many processes
    some access violation
    "//f/gnuwin32/b18/H-i386-cygwin32/bin/sed.exe: Permission denied"
    (and several other utilities with the same failure)
    "a quiet death of a shell command."
    The spawning process goes into a busy wait until it is killed
    "a error exit code on the which ever command I just issued."

It happens most frequently to multi command pipe lines, but also hits
random interactive commands.

It has occurred in sh.exe, grep, sed, hostname, make, ...

My system is a 200mhz pentitum pro with 128 meg of memory, and lots of
disk.
NT 4.0 sp3, what I can not figure our is why this started, and how to
make it go away.  Several friends have the same configuration/software,
but rarely or never see the problem.  I saw it occasionally, once a
month, but now I see it all the time.
It has happened 50+ times since I started typing this message.

I tried to build the sources so I could understand what was going on and
provide a fix, or work-around, but I have been unable to configure or
make enough of  b18 to build a new dll.  (My 20th attempt generated the
now 60+ errors during this message.)  I tried the chunk_size_in_mb
registry patch that was suggested by some for b15, I tried coolview, and
several over random possibilities.

Reading through the archives I can see that others have had simular
problems in the past, but when I have contacted those that reported them
those that answered said the b18 fixed it for them.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to what else I should look at?  It is
very bizarre, and very random.  Sometimes it happens on most commands,
and other times it allows scripts like configure to go through several
directories between failures.  I have tried running configure as the
only process and not touch the keyboard, or with a large number of
processes that are active.  It doesn't seem to make a big difference.
A small note I have noticed that test -w always fails in shell scripts
on writable files both in an NTFS and a FAT16 file system.  Any
suggestion on that would be helpful as well.

Suggestions would be appreciated.

Rich

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