First report and some discussion here:
http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2012-04/0186.shtml
For convenience, I'm reproducing some info from the mailthread:
I get lots of crashes (and sometimes infinite loops) when running the testsuite
with serf on my Windows XP (x86) machine when the "Surf-Shield" option of "AVG
Anti-virus Free Edition 2012"[1] is enabled (this option is enabled by default).
This happens both with 1.7.4 and with trunk (with both serf 1.0.0 and serf
1.0.3). It's new since I updated AVG to version 2012, somewhere beginning of
this year. These crashes do not occur when disabling Surf-Shield, or when using
neon (with Surf-Shield enabled).
I don't know what Surf-Shield does. Its description says: "Can detect exploit
sites and other complex online threats". There is some more explanation on the
AVG website, but it's still pretty vague [2]. Maybe it does some throttling or
cutting up of requests/responses, inspecting things or so, ... but whatever it
does, svn+serf should probably not crash or hang. I'm guessing AVG is used by a
significant percentage of non-corporate Windows users (and Surf-Shield is
enabled by default in the Free Edition 2012). I'm not sure if the fact that the
server runs on localhost (and thus with very fast access) is part of the equation.
Here are some of the tests that crash:
authz_tests.py 4, 5, 7, 10, 15, 16
basic_tests.py 6, 21, 31, 59
blame_tests.py 10
(I stopped here)
These really hang (one cpu core fully occupied by svn.exe, memory usage
continuously increasing a bit (a couple of KB's per second); I can only continue
after killing the svn.exe process):
authz_tests.py 14
blame_tests.py 3
Most of the crashes are similar, crashing somewhere inside
svn_ra_serf__get_mergeinfo(). But there are also a couple of others.
I think other Windows users should be able to reproduce this if they install AVG
2012 Free Edition, and run the serf tests.
This is with Apache 2.2.19, with mpm_winnt.
I'll attach test output, crash dump and wiretraces to this issue.
[1] http://www.avg.com
[2] http://www.avg.com/eu-en/linkscanner
Bug
Major