"find" memory(handle) leak, / problem...proc related, (don't do this at home! :-))

[linda w <cygwin at tlinx dot org>]

Among my maint process run each night one deletes old tmp files and
finds them using 'find'.

When I ran it yesterday, I was using process exporer to try to monitor it
but Proxexp couldn't dispay the lower panel when selected for displaying
handles....then I config'ed it to display # of handles in the upper panel.

I saw it have over 40 thousand handles open before I gave up trying to
monitor it.

At first, on a rerun, I noted it had several handles to processes that no
longer existed.  Possibly having some function similar to the old zombie
processes on *nix.  This list slowly seemed to grow over time...then it 
jumped
to around 800+...that's when I noticed a bunch of handles to all of the 
registry
keys under the classes. 

Right now, I am not able to track it, as the number
of handles has jumped to 91,138.  If I wasn't on an NT based OS (XP), the
process would have likely terminated at this point.  I guess #of handles
isn't limited to 64K/process anymore either! :-)

Just a guess, but maybe find is doing a breadth first search on the
registry-fs in proc?  The zombie-process handles may have been a
red-herring.

I think this has to do with the idea of creating real fs entries
for /proc and /cygwin.  That might not be such a good idea since
one can always give /proc on the cmdline to find to start in and
it will search it then.  Yeikes!....


-linda


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