RE: Call for testing Cygwin snapshot

["Jerry D. Hedden" <jerry at hedden dot us>]

Jerry D. Hedden wrote:
>I have a cron job (a bash script) that runs every 6 minutes, polling
>and downloading info off the web.
>
>The problem is the script hangs at various places and the stuck
>processes keep building up.
>
>Further, I have to kill these processes using the task monitor: kill
>reports 'No such process'.

Christopher Faylor replied:
>As mentioned above, a test case showing the problem sure would be
>nifty.

Jerry D. Hedden responded:
>I agree and would have provided one if I could.  However, I have no
>idea what is causing this, nor how to write a test case for it.
>
>As I said, it's a cron job running a bash script - nothing fancy.  The
>hang does not happen on every invokation of the script, but it does
>occur frequently.  Where in the script it gets stuck seems to be
>random: wget, mkdir, mv, date, diff, etc..

Christopher Faylor asked:
> Can you at least post the script?

Certainly.  Attached.


Christopher Faylor asked:
> Also, knowing the first snapshot which shows the problem would be helpful.

Jerry D. Hedden responded:
>As I said, these sort of problems started after the 2006-03-09 snapshot.
> I double checked, and the problem does occur with the 2006-03-13
>snapshot.

Christopher Faylor replied:
>What you said was "However, I have experienced problems with most
>snapshots after it", where "it" was the 2006-03-09 snapshot.  The use of
>the word "most" rather than "all" there implies, to me at least, that
>there were snapshots that worked.  You seem to now be saying that this
>is not the case, which implies that something stopped working for you
>on 2006-03-13 and that no snapshot on or after that point worked.

Let me clarify.  Starting with the 2006-03-13 snapshot, every snapshot I
tried caused problems.  Although I did not try every one (sorry, but I
did not keep track of which ones), I know I tried over half of the 18
or so snapshots in question.  Since none that I tried worked, I have
been held at the 2006-03-09 snapshot.

The basic problem noted in each case had to do with forks - either a
cron script hangs (as reported), a build script fails because of fork
failures ('resource not available' type messages), or couldn't bring up
shell windows (as reported in
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2006-03/msg00487.html).

All of this started with Christopher Faylor's changes related to 'fork'
that started with the 2006-03-13 snapshot.  As I did report one problem
related to this matter on the 3/15 but go no response, I figured the
work was ongoing.  I just kept trying subsequent snapshots hoping the
problem would be cleared up eventually, but it hasn't.

Attachment: weather
Description: Text document

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