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Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:17:59 -0500
From: Charles Wilson <cygwin AT cwilson DOT fastmail DOT fm>
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Subject: Re: Excessive thrashing when popen()ing after a large malloc()
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Christopher Faylor wrote:

> Fully implementing posix_spawn is quite a bit of work although I did
> tell Linus Torvalds that I'd look into implementing it in Cygwin
> eventually (it would make git-on-cygwin faster).
> 
> I have a patch in my sandbox which implements a more lightweight
> approach for popen using cygwin internals.

Don't you go thru this exercise about every two years?

1) fork/exec implementation in cygwin sux
2) attempt to rewrite cygwin internals to use symantics of 
spawn|vfork|some-other-clever-idea
3) it breaks a bunch of stuff
4) try to patch around the problems, repeat #3
4) revert back to original fork/exec implementation

What's different this time?  (Really, I'm not being snarky, and maybe 
I'm misremembering, but I'd hate to see precious developer time spent in 
#2 thru #4 if #5 will happen anyway -- if the past is any guide.)

--
Chuck


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