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Re: Problem with setup


On 17 Nov, Max Bowsher wrote:
>  Luke Kendall wrote:
> > I should also add that after a setup.exe crash at 9:38am after being
> > left running overnight, later attempts to install that day (with the VM
> > size steadily increasing, and setup.exe appearing to "stick" at the
> > stage where it is installing the zip package), that setup.log was not
> > updated by the later installation attempts.
>  >
> > Shouldn't setup.log be getting opened in append mode?  We examined it
> > at various times during a later installation attempt, and the contents
> > didn't change and the file modification time stayed at 9:38am.
>  
>  At the moment, the log files are written to disc in one bulk write when 
>  setup.exe completes. That's probably not a great design feature.

Ah.  Absolutely.  If setup crashes, you have no debug information!
I usually fflush after writing an entry to a log file - it's more
important to have accurate debug info than to save a few seconds on
execution time, I reckon.

And in other emails:

> > I can confirm this.  We took a snapshot of October 26th
> > (setup-timestamp: 1098732614), and in that version of setup,
> 
> That number you quoted identifies the version of the setup.ini datafile, not 
> the setup.exe program.

Sorry, how's this?
$  bunzip2 -c setup.bz2 | head -5
# This file is automatically generated.  If you edit it, your
# edits will be discarded next time the file is generated.
# See http://cygwin.com/setup.html for details.
#
setup-timestamp: 1098732614

> > none of
> > the file handles for any of the temp files of the form (where c:\temp
> > is your temporary package directory) c:\temp\http%.....\package.tar.bz2
> > is ever released.  The system starts page faulting and the number of
> > handles just grows and grows, and eventually setup dies like this:
> >
> > Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Error
> > Runtime Error!
> > Program \\samba\install\win32\cygwin\setup.exe
> > This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an
> > unusual way.  Please contact the application's support team for
> > more information.
> 
> 
> That's nasty. I wonder why we haven't seen more reports of this.
> 
> Is there any reason why your machine should be more susceptible to this? 
> (Low memory, any kind of resource limits?)

Not that I'm aware of, no.  One machine was dual processor, 1GB of
memory.  Interestingly, looking at Task Manager during setup.exe's run,
even though there seemed to be plenty of physical memory, it changed to
display page fault activity rather than RAM usage.  Tweaking TM to show
page fault activity and handles showed that there was a lot of page
faults from setup, and a steadily growing number of handles (the
..tar.bz2 files which were never released).

The other PC that showed the problem had 512MB of memory, and no
special resource limits.

> >> At the crash point, setup.exe has some 600 open handles and 2 Gb of VM. 
> >> It's
> >> accumulated 2.5 million page faults.
> 
> Wow!
> 
> Well, it's not quite as dramatic here, but I can see a good few leaked 
> handles in Process Explorer.

Yes, we looked in PE too, and it was clear that no .tar.bz2 file handle
was released.  We were trying a fresh install, and selected "All" (i.e.
every package).

> I've committed a fix, but unfortunately, when I begun testing to prepare for 
> a release, I ran into all sorts of nasty problems, including being unable to 
> reinstall Cygwin, having uninstalled it to test setup. I'm going to keep 
> working on it though... after I've completely purged Cygwin from my 
> computer, reinstalled, and set up a VM to do tests in without disrupting my 
> primary machine. Might take a while.

Sorry to be causing you such hassles.  I'm hoping to get a chance to
try the latest Cygwin:

# This file is automatically generated.  If you edit it, your
# edits will be discarded next time the file is generated.
# See http://cygwin.com/setup.html for details.
#
setup-timestamp: 1100546431

luke


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