allocate heap space shell startup failure

[Christopher Faylor]

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

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