Re: Xwin 1.14.2 (64 bit) extreme memory page faulting

[Erik Soderquist <erik dot soderquist at gmail dot com>]

On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 6:51 PM, Ryan Johnson
<ryan.johnson@cs.utoronto.ca> wrote:
> On 02/10/2013 2:50 PM, Erik Soderquist wrote:
>>
>> I am currently using the X server on a Windows 7 64 bit host for
>> Firefox (in particular, occasional terminals too).
<snip>
> Is there really a Firefox build for cygwin/X ? Or are you tunneling from
> some other machine?

My apologies; Firefox is running on a CentOS host and I have tried
both raw X and tunneled through ssh.  I am currently tunneling though
ssh as the raw X was a test only to see if it was a tunnel issue.

>
>> Testing with antivirus and firewall enabled/disabled did not affect
>> the results.  (faq reference
>> http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/cygwin-x-faq.html#poor-performance found
>> during searches).
>
> If antivirus is a problem (as in BLODA), you probably need to uninstall, not
> just disable. They're usually too lazy to actually remove their hooks when
> "off" and just (try to) make the hooks become (mostly) no-ops instead. Not
> saying it's your problem, necessarily, just that merely disabling AV is not
> enough to rule it out.
>

Unfortunately, uninstall is not an option for me.  Corporate Policy
prevents it on several levels.  However, my disable of the
A/V-firewall packages was by going into the Windows Services applets
and disabling the services there and via a couple registry hacks and
then rebooting so the A/V and firewall pieces could not load to start
with.  They are as ruled out as I can make them currently.  I will
look into the possibility of a VM to test without them entirely and
see if i can still reproduce the issue.

> Also (not necessarily related to this particular problem), cygcheck reports
> a surprising selection of *nix-like utilities in c:\windows\bin. Whatever
> they are, they can't be helping.

Those existed only on the current test machine.  In theory, since they
are later in the path in the cygwin environment, they should never be
executed unless called by full path, but I do appreciate it being
pointed out.  I should have mentioned their existence on this machine
to start with.

> I doubt it's an X-server code issue. You tried it on too many machines with
> problems, and too many other people aren't spamming the list about this,
> which suggests it's something on your side (like BLODA). Further, the only
> cygwin bug I've known to cause lots of paging was plugged months ago (it had
> to do with sparse executable files and should have been irrelevant for this
> situation anyway).

The only (known) BLODA I have from that list is the McAfee
A/V-firewall, which I can't remove, but I believe was completely
disabled by the above described method.

> My advice: check out the cygwin FAQ about BLODA, uninstall anything listed
> there (or install a fresh VM image somewhere without those) and try again.
> If it's still a problem, somebody more familiar with X than me will have to
> take over...
>

> Ryan

If I can get the authorization for a VM test without A/V, I will and
the results will be posted here either way.  Thank you for your time
in looking at this.

--- Erik

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