Bad Address error from random executables causing freezes after upgrading to Win7

[Wayne Hayes]

Folks,

I recently upgraded to Windows 7.  Before that I was running XP with Cygwin 5.1.
(I can't give you the exact version because it's now gone).  I have scripts
running in the background constantly doing things like downloading news, 
uploading
my current dynamic IP to another machine, running a nigthly unison, etc.  
Immediately
after upgrading to Windows 7, I started seeing very infrequent errors like the 
following:

[... a few minutes of execution without errors ...]
/home/wayne/bin/quote: line 8: /usr/bin/date: Bad address
[... a few more minutes of execution without errors ... ]
/home/wayne/bin/quote: line 74: /usr/bin/tr: Bad address
[... a few more minutes of execution without errors ... ]
bash: /home/wayne/bin/quote: /bin/sh: bad interpreter: Bad address
/home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
/home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
/home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
/home/wayne/bin/quote: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable

Note that the error is coming from random executables called from my scripts.
Now, the fork: Resource temporarily unavaible errors I've seen before, ongoing
for years, and they're annoying but not critical because execution would always
continue.  I would also consider these Bad address errors not to be crucial 
except
occasionally they cause my script to just freeze up and stop dead.  Not good 
since
I need these scripts to be running continuously.

The first thing I did was upgrade from Cygwin 5.1 to 6.1, the most recent stable
release.  It didn't solve the problem.  Then I tried re-compiling all my own 
personal
executables.  No luck.  Then I found a description of a similar problem back in
August on this list,

http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2010-08/msg00277.html

where Corinna Vinschen suggested getting the most recent developer version.  I
assumed this means cygwin1.dll.  So I went and got the most recent developer
version, which is 13 February 2011, and I downloaded and un-tar'd

http://cygwin.org/snapshots/cygwin-inst-20110213.tar.bz2

Then I rebooted.  No luck.  The problem persists.

This is what uname -a now says:

CYGWIN_NT-6.1 pisa 1.7.8s(0.236/5/3) 20110213 16:43:51 i686 Cygwin

Has anybody else encountered this problem?  Any clue as to what's causing it?

-- 
Wayne Hayes, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department.
4092 Bren Hall, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3435.
e-mail: wa...@ics.uci.edu; Office Phone: +1-949-824-1753
Base 10 sucks.  If God had been a decent mathematician,
he would've given us 12 fingers instead of 10. - unknown

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Re: [wayne@cs.toronto.edu: Cygwin-1.5.5 sscanf on floats: 20 times slower than 2 years ago]

[Wayne Hayes]

Since scanf and the floating point arithmetic is implemented in newlib,
I've redirected this message there.  Does anybody have an idea, what
could slow down float scanning in sscanf by a factor of 20?

Thanks!  Just to be pedentic, I realized that it's worse than a factor of 20.
My *entire simulation* slows down by a factor of 20; there's significant
other computation in it.  So the scanf slowdown is probably closer to
hundreds of times.  *Something* fishy must be going on.  :-)


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Cygwin-1.5.5 sscanf on floats: 20 times slower than 2 years ago

[Wayne Hayes]

Hello.  Until recently I was running W2k with an ancient version of
cygwin; I don't know what version it was, but if anybody cares I've
put a copy of cygwin1.dll (dated 2001-May-20) at

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~wayne/tmp/cygwin1-old.dll.gz

It worked fine on W2k for the past 2.5 years.

I recently upgraded to Windows XP and this old cygwin stopped working.
No problem, I say, it's also time to upgrade cygwin, so I go install the
most recent version.

Everything works fine, except one of my I/O intensive simulations starts
running about 20 times slower!

After copious mucking about, I finally narrowed it down to sscanf: sscanf
on double precisions numbers, such as

double a;
char line [80];
fgets(line...)
sscanf(line, %lf, a);

runs about 20 times slower than in the old cygwin.  Replacing the sscanf
with a call to atof gets back the old speed.  It's only noticable, of
course, if you're scanning a huge file.  In my case, it's a 60MB file
that contains tens of thousands of lines of ASCII floating point numbers.

So, consider this a bug report.  A slowdown of a factor of 20 is not really
a good thing.

The output of cygcheck -s -v -r  cygcheck.out can be found at

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~wayne/tmp/cygcheck-XP-1.5.5.out.gz

Thanks!

- Wayne


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