Re: [Bug-wget] Wget keeps crashing on me

[William Higgs]

Ok.  I will just use the build you sent me.  Its kind of a pet-peeve of mine
to not use the most up-to-date version of a piece of software, and I am not
so advanced in my IT skills (yet) to be able to compile my own Windows
binary of wget, and I certainly don't want to compromise my system, so I
will just make do.  Thank you gentlemen for you assistance in this matter.

-----Original Message-----
From: Eli Zaretskii [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2017 11:02 PM
To: William Higgs <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden; address@hidden; address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Bug-wget] Wget keeps crashing on me

> From: William Higgs <address@hidden>
> Cc: <address@hidden>,
>       'Jernej Simončič' <jernej|address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 14 May 2017 21:17:02 -0400
> 
> Hey guys.  So while I was doing some research, I found the following 
> post located at
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35004832/wget-exe-for-windows-10/3
> 796296
> 5#37962965
> :
> "eternallybored build will crash when you are downloading a large file.
> This can be avoided by disabling LFH (Low Fragmentation Heap) by 
> GlobalFlag registry."

Makes absolutely no sense to me.  LFH is the default heap allocation
strategy on MS-Windows since Vista; disabling it is only justified when
running a program under a debugger.  Disabling LFH globally for your entire
system means you risk running out of heap memory in some memory-intensive
applications, utterly unrelated to wget.

If that particular build of wget crashes when LFH is in use, it most
probably means a subtle memory-allocation bug, which is simply swept under
the carpet by changing the algorithm for heap allocation.  So I would
suggest to simply switch to a different build of wget, instead of
compromising your entire system.

> However, after looking into how to do this, I cannot find an 
> explanation as to how to do this.  Can someone please provide some
assistance?

 
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/929136/why-the-low-fragmentation-he
ap-lfh-mechanism-may-be-disabled-on-some-computers-that-are-running-windows-
server-2003,-windows-xp,-or-windows-2000

But I'm not sure this will work on Windows 10, and I urge you not to do this
in the first place.