From: Robert Klemme Date: 2011-09-15T01:02:50+09:00 Subject: Re: weird behaviour spawning processes On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 5:25 PM, James French wrote: > Lately I've been having a hell of a time (a bad time) trying to fix an E2BIG error coming from spawn. I finally tracked it down to a bug in win32.c  (http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5325). Great. Then I tried to build ruby from source using VS2008, which I did. Great. Then I discovered that my unit test that fires off thousands of little processes takes about 500ms to run each process where it used to take a few milliseconds. The even weirder thing is that every now and again when I run it it goes at normal speed, but only occasionally. WTF? I've spent all day on this and I'm starting to tear my hair out. Any ideas what could account for this? Just a few wild guesses: compiler switches (optimization), linking (static vs. shared), compiler brand (aren't binary distros compiled with MinGW?), virus scanner, disk activity... Kind regards robert -- remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/