workaround for fork problems?

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

Corinna and I have been looking into the reported problems with fork
("file not found", "died waiting for longjmp", and others) for a while
now but have been unable to come up with a cygwin-specific solution.

Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have a fix:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824422

This suggests that, if you have problems running an application, you
should increase some system heap settings.

Using the instructions in this article, I bumped up the settings of all
of the heaps, and I no longer have any problems running a contrived test
case which tickled the problem.

While I'd prefer a solution which I could apply to cygwin and which
would affect everyone, I think I'm ready to admit defeat on this one and
just release 1.5.19 as-is.  FWIW, the reported fork problem doesn't seem
to be a regression from 1.5.18.

So, anyway, if you are having fork problems you might want to give the
above a try.  It should go without saying that you really have to BE
CAREFUL when making the suggested modifications to your registry since
tinkering with this stuff could make your system completely inoperable.
I can't suggest any "good" parameters for the heap values since it seems
that the requirements vary depending on what you're running on your
system.  In my case, I quadrupled the size of all of the parameters but
that's probably major overkill for this problem.  Probably just adding
512 to each parameter would be adequate.

cgf

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