Hej Marshall,

I had similar experiences a year ago with the emulation of fork in Windows (Windows 7 Home Premium with Service Pack 1).

Running the tests of Test::TCP (version 1.11 and 1.12) on Windows resulted often in a blocking Perl interpreter. Sometimes the system reached at state, that it must be restarted.

I started trying to isolate the problem and this is so far I came: https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=66016#txn-910155.

My experiences/conclusion using perlfork - Perl's fork() emulation in Windows, are:

• There is stochastic involved. Two identical calls (expected to give the same result) can give different results. What I understand is the problem in the implementation of the Windows API and not in the Perl implementation.
• In some cases the processes running the Perl interpreter are blocking (coming in an unwanted state).
• Sometimes the problem is not solved by restarting the Perl interpreter. Is there some missing initializations in the Perl interpreter?
• In some rare situations the total system (not just the process running the Perl interpreter) is affected, and must be restarted. Sometimes it even must be restated using power down/up. The isolation between processes and the operating system in Windows has some weakness?

The questions which worries me are:

• Is it advisable to use the Perl's fork() emulation in Windows in “production” code?
• Is it enough to run the test of Perl modules just once or how many times are they needed to be run?

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