X-Recipient: archive-cygwin@delorie.com X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:36:12 -0400 From: Christopher Faylor To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: allocate heap space shell startup failure Message-ID: <20100324173612.GA18265@ednor.casa.cgf.cx> Reply-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com References: <20100324164031.M12968@ds.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20100324164031.M12968@ds.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 12:23:56PM -0500, Brian Wilson wrote: >I have a Windows XP (SP3+updates) machine (DELL XPS, 3.2 GHz, 4Gb) running >McAfee AV and Smart Ram from Advanced System Care by IOBIT.com. I've >attached my cygcheck output. > >Sometimes (about 50% of the time) when I try to start the Cygwin shell (bash), >by double clicking the Cygwin icon, I get an error like the attached error >file. I recently updated to Cygwin 1.7.2 but was experiencing the heap space >allocation error in earlier versions as well. A lot of times my installs get >hung trying to run the update-info.dir.sh script and I believe this error is >the cause (or at least related). Even though it looks like the bash shell >prompt is displayed, any command I try just results in more heap space error >messages. The error you're getting probably indicates that something allocated space in a region of memory where a forked Cygwin process was expecting to allocate the heap. Playing with heap_chunk_in_mb won't fix this There isn't a registry setting which will fix this. It's likely that either McAfee, Smart Ram, or some other resident process is interfering. So the only way to get Cygwin running may be to stop those processes from running entirely. Btw, please note that the location has changed for Cygwin 1.7.2 http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/setup-maxmem.html cgf -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple