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Re: Information regarding problem when Windows cannot re-use PIDnumbers


Hello list,

Rogier & I have been busy trying to isolate the memory leak problem we have encountered on Win2k machines. A lot of people on this list have suggested this is in fact a Win2k problem. We have indeed verified this is indeed not a CygWin issue, but I am not totally convinced this is a Windows problem. The following command can be used to reproduce the leak:

FOR /L %a IN (1,1,65535) DO echo exit | cmd

By using the task manager, you can notice an increase in the use of memory. symptoms:
- the available free physical memory reduces with a constant interval, this will continue untill all physical memory is used
- apparently Windows can not swap this space, when it is no longer possible to start a new command shell, there is still lots of swap space available
- the memory is never freed, not even when a user logs off
- starting more applications will eventually cause Windows to crash


The reason why I am not convinced this is a Windows problem, is because of the fact that I have tested this on several Win2k machines, some of them suffer from this bug while others do not. These machines are identical and are installed using the same image. My guess was that it is related to same 3rd party services, likely antivirus and/or personal firewall software.

zenma wrote:

I had to reinstall Windows to find what is causing it, and finally was able to do it.
It was a Firewall software called Agnitum Outpost which was causing such a bad behavior. When i uninstalled this application problems have gone and windows was able to re-use PID numbers again as it should. This is related to both Outpost 1.0 and 2.0 versions. This was tested on different computers (Windows XP [SP1]).
I have sent a bug report few days ago regarding this problem to Agnitum.

The machines that suffer from this bug have indeed Outpost installed, however I have manually stopped the Outpost service on these machines and run the test mentioned above. I have not yet uninstalled Outpost, but because it has helped solve the problem for you, I'll try this monday when I am at work. I hope Agnitum can solve this issue.

I know, this is not related to cygwin, but i thought it might be a valuable information to some people who ran into this problem and was not able to find the cause.


I too think this is valuable information, especially because ./configure, make & make install are frequent used commands by CygWin users.

Regards,
Yorick
--
Ing. Yorick Koster <mailto:y.koster@itsec-ss.nl>
Security Engineer
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