Re^3: Win32 - Memory can not be "read"

This appears to be related to this ActiveState bug report against ActivePerl 809 (built on 5.8.3) and also this Perlbug ticket for 5.8.0 on Linux. It's listed as unconfirmed and medium priority by ActiveState. It's stalled waiting for example code that triggers it on perlbug.

There seems to be a pretty good explanation of what appears to be going on (although I can't vouch for its accuracy). It seems from the two separate bug reports against two different dot releases on two different platforms that the bug came from upstream of ActiveState and affects at least four dot releases of 5.8 so far. I don't see anything in change logs saying it's been fixed in newer versions, but I'll admit I may have missed it. Also, it may be lumped into one of the "many things fixed" lines somewhere in a perldelta.

I can't find an ActivePerl built from 5.8.5 so I guess it's pretty certain you're using something else. Another Perl on Windows project or built from source? On cygwin or not?

Since the bug reports are waiting for an example or more of the problem, I'd suggest replying to stmpeters on the Perl 5 RT system at the above-mentioned bug #34450 about your code. If it turns out to be a known issue fixed in a newer version, at least the bug tracker will be updated to show that and you'll be told what version was first fixed.

Of course, this being PerlMonks, someone with the skills, time, and access to look into this might be reading the thread right now. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that, though.

Might be good to test a newer version first. If a test box with 5.8.7 or 5.8.8 doesn't seem to fix it, you might consider a bug report after that.

Christopher E. Stith

Comment on Re^3: Win32 - Memory can not be "read"

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Re^4: Win32 - Memory can not be "read" by HuckinFappy (Pilgrim) on Oct 08, 2006 at 03:19 UTC
Thank you! +++++++ I'll see if I can somehow boil this down to a test case...if not, at least it's nice to understand what's happening a little better!	[reply]
Re^5: Win32 - Memory can not be "read" by Steve_p (Priest) on Oct 09, 2006 at 03:33 UTC
I you have some example code, please please please reply to the ticket so I can reopen it. Its exeptionally hard to tell whether a bug is fixed or not without some code to test with.	[reply]
Re^6: Win32 - Memory can not be "read" by HuckinFappy (Pilgrim) on Oct 09, 2006 at 15:52 UTC
The problem is I can't consistently recreate this. It's about a .0015% occurance rate. I see around 20 failures for every 25,000 perl invocations in a build of our code base. Still trying to isolate it...	[reply]
Re^5: Win32 - Memory can not be "read" by jbert (Priest) on Oct 08, 2006 at 09:35 UTC
If the problem is the for() bug referred to (and it seems like a good candidate) and a later version of perl doesn't have it fixed, then you could work around the problem by hacking on the module - you could try changing the for() loop to a while loop with an explicit counter on number of iterations.	[reply]