cygwin memory leak problems: possible solution

["Luca Trevisani" <lucatrv at hotmail dot com>]

Hi, I encountered memory leaks problems compiling a large code under cygwin.
I tried both under winxp and win2k with same result: the memory resources of
the system started slowly falling down, up to the end of the process with
error messages like "fork: resource temporarily unavailable".

I found many discussions on this topic on the cygwin mailing list, such as:
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-08/msg00328.html
http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2006-06/msg00366.html
so I think it is a known problem many people face, but I could not find any
solution to the problem.

After many tries, I found the solution: in my case the problem was the
zonealarm firewall. Since zonealarm is widely used, I suspect the same issue
affects the pc of many others. Unfortunately it is not enough to turn off or
disable zonealarm to avoid the problem. It is needed to uninstall it, and to
be sure it is better to follow the full list of things to do to be sure to
completely uninstall zonealarm as reported on:
http://www.nohold.net/noHoldCust25/Prod_1/Articles55646/CompleteUninstallNonNT.html

I have tried many other free firewall programs and did not encounter this
issue anymore, you can try for instance: Ashampoo Firewall, Comodo Firewall,
PC Tools Firewall, Sygate Personal Firewall etc...

If the solution is confirmed by other users facing this issue, I think it
should be included in the cygwin FAQ. The incompatibility is in fact very
difficult to detect, because it remains even if the zonealarm firewall is
disabled.

Bye,
Luca 


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