Thanks for all the ideas jbert. The machines are under relatively significant load, but not in terms of number of processes. These dual processor machines have the following on them:

• A perl client script (well, 2...one per processor)
• Client polls server to get next available build job
• Client spawns perl script (and then waits for it) which:
  1. converts make template into make file
  2. runs make
• client notifies server job is complete and gets next one

So there's not a lot going on in parallel, but the network/cpu/memory can get pretty hammered (the local disk is almost a noop in most of these cases)

The perl is slightly mroe complicated than you see in most build environments, but it's not rocket science by any means.

I was able last night to re-enable the pop-ups, and caught some data this morning. It's Greek to me, but I'll include it here for the sake of completeness. First, the last few frames of the stack trace (I have it all for anyone interested):

>msvcrt.dll!77c46fa3()     
perl58.dll!Perl_newFOROP(interpreter * my_perl=0x00225ffc, long flags=
+0, char * label=0x01867624, unsigned long forline=32, op * sv=0x00000
+000, op * expr=0x018956f4, op * block=0x018955dc, op * cont=0x0000000
+0)  Line 3877 + 0x9    C
perl58.dll!Perl_yyparse(interpreter * my_perl=0x0173adfc)  Line 257 + 
+0x18    C
perl58.dll!S_doeval(interpreter * my_perl=0x01890668, int gimme=0, op 
+* * startop=0x00000000, cv * outside=0x00000000, unsigned long seq=26
+30)  Line 2817 + 0x6    C
perl58.dll!Perl_pp_require(interpreter * my_perl=0x0167a5ac)  Line 331
+4 + 0x3a    C
perl58.dll!Perl_runops_standard(interpreter * my_perl=0x00225ffc)  Lin
+e 23 + 0xc    C
[download]

And the disassembly of the memory around where it faulted:

77C46F9B  and         edx,3 
77C46F9E  cmp         ecx,8 
77C46FA1  jb          77C46FCC 
77C46FA3  rep movs    dword ptr [edi],dword ptr [esi] 
77C46FA5  jmp         dword ptr [edx*4+77C470B8h] 
77C46FAC  mov         eax,edi 
77C46FAE  mov         edx,3 
77C46FB3  sub         ecx,4
[download]

I did go look up op.c, which is where Perl_newFOROP() is defined, and found line 3877, which is:

    Copy(loop,tmp,1,LOOP);
[download]

As I say, it's Greek to me, but maybe someone sees something significant here?

Thanks to all, I know we're on the fringe of "is this a perl issue or a Windows problem", which means we're moving from something I know something about into the huge unknown for me (completely linux-centric)

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