Subject: Win2k and cygwin memory leak
From: "R. Boon" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2003 12:28:25 +0200

Hello list,

I noticed a problem with cygwin. It seems that some installations of
cygwin running on windows 2000 are leaking memory. The memory leak is
located in some kernel part of the operating system since it is not
cleaned up after all user space applications are close. 

This issue is reported previously to the cygwin list. This issue is
reported as a make failure:
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-04/msg02219.html

And as an issue with fork:
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-02/msg00551.html

I can confirm the reported symptoms. Every time I start a child process,
I loos some memory. Once all my memory and swap is depleted, I cannot
start new applications. Even closing running applications causes
trouble. A reboot is needed to restore the system. 

As an additional symptom I get the following question when I quit
cygwin. 
Terminate batch job (Y/N)?

This seems to indicate that child processes are not terminated and/or
completely removed from memory.

I tested this issue on four hosts
1. a Win2k SP4 with Cygwin 1.3.22 (128 Mb)
2. a Win2k SP4 with Cygwin 1.5.1 (128 Mb)
3. a Win2k SP4 with Cygwin 1.3.22 (192 Mb)
4. a Win2k SP4 with Cygwin 1.3.22 (256 Mb) <- not affected

Host nr. 4 is not affected by this issue. None of the tests lead to even
the slightest sign of a memory leak. All systems are installed with the
basic cygwin install using the setup.exe program from www.cygwin.com

Is there a solution to this issue that is never posted? Has anyone with
the same issue tried to fiddle with a memory limit setting of some sort?
(and did is work?)

Thank you for your time

greetings
Rogier

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