Massive XP memory leak?

[elkinm]

I have 512 MB or ram. I did some regular things, watched some divx movies and now cacheman is showing my free ram at 5 mb. Task manager shows total memoy usage at under 100 MB and VM usage is also around 100 mb, commit charge is at 250 and system cache at 450 mb. The system is runnung extremely slow and I have no idea why. Anybody know what can cause this and how I can prevent it.

Thnaks
elkinm

 

[elkinm]

Used memory recovery with cacheman 6 times. FIrst got to 50 MB then to 70 MB the 100 MB then to 150 MB then 250+ MB and then to 300+ mb. At least cacheman works but it took six times to get it to normal. The system was slow at first but quickly spead up. Anybody know how to fix this?

Thanks

 

[mikecel79]

What were you using to watch movies?

 

[dawks]

Check the processes tab and see whats holding the memory. Missleading thread titles suck.

BTW, these 'ram manager' programs are a HORRIBLE idea in NT based systems. The NT kernal does an amazing job at managing memory, provided programs are coded properly, and in your case, it seems one wasnt.

 

[elkinm]

I use WMP 6.4. Total memory usage, and virtual memory usage is under 100 MB each. This seems to happen all the time in XP but not at regular intervalst. Total CPU usage is also very low so I don't understand why my system slows so much. The only thing I noticed is that the system cache was at 450+ MB. Normaly it is above 300 but my system runs fine but this happens nearly every day. I use cacheman to recover memory as it can do nothing else in XP and recovery takes several tries after which the cache drops to nearly zero then free memory is back to normal. So clearly I can only guess that the leak somehow occurs in the system cache and the ram becomes locked and cannot be released unless sevaral attemps are made. My guess that this may have something to do with possible coruption in large files were explorer might have 100% CPU usage. I don't have CPU usage problems so the file is good but my guess that after long use the cache becomes corrupted and eats ram like crazy. I have not found any way to fix it or to possibly even dissable the cache, although that is a bad idea.

Thanks

 

[dawks]

Again, go to the processes tab and see whats taking all the memory.

System cache as explained to me, is simply where XP saves frequently used programs for quicker access. Its not a memory leak.

If your system is slowing, it could be very likely a program is mis-behaving. ie, using/mis-using too much ram/paged-memory.. or CPU time. Go to the processes tab, check the Mem Usage tab, and enable and check the VM Size tab.

See whats taking a huge amount of memory.

 

[elkinm]

Processes tab shows normal even when the problem is occuring. Explorer uses the most space with 20 mb and about 15 mb of virtual memory.

If I see a program using to much ram, I close it and everything is usualy fine. The problem is when I don't know where the memory whent like this.

 

[Jeff7]

WMP6.4? That might be why - I noticed that playing videos with older versions of WMP (anything not v9.x, that is) would gradually eat away at available RAM - it would just eat through about 200MB of RAM over several minutes - then when it gets to around 8MB free, it jumps back up to 30MB, but that just goes down again. I had trouble using the computer during video playback, as it would use virtual memory a lot because it thought that there wasn't any RAM free. So then I'd close WMP, and the system would go nuts swapping between RAM and the pagefile. I don't seem to have this problem anymore with WMP9.

Processes tab shows normal even when the problem is occuring. Explorer uses the most space with 20 mb and about 15 mb of virtual memory.

If I see a program using to much ram, I close it and everything is usualy fine. The problem is when I don't know where the memory whent like this

It was like this for me too - the wmplayer.exe process would be using several megabytes, even while the free memory size would keep declining. But once that process was terminated, all that free RAM, which taskmanager insisted that wmplayer.exe was NOT taking up, would come back.

 

[elkinm]

It has been a while since my last post here as I updated to 1 GB ram and did not have this problem since my last post. Right now adding up all the entries in task manager. Total ram usage is at about 222 MB, and VM usage is 178 MB. PF usage is listed at 396 MB and commit charge is at 405684. System cache is at 762xxx+ and memory free is at 358xxx-. Other then some IE and explorer windows nothing else is running. The most ram is used by svchost.exe and 23 MB with explorer next at 10 MB and explorer and Iexplorer use 40 MB VM each.

Nothing is running and yet there is so little free ram and although I am fine with 1 Gig of ram, this crippled my 512 before. All the number are about normal except for the ram. I put + and - for the cache and free ram as cache is growing and ram is declining slowly but continuously. Usualy cache is high but so is free ram as the cache space can be given up at any time. I believe that there was a bug in the cache system as cache is locking the ram so it cannot be released.

Although my system is still fine with 1 GB, I don't know when it might deside to slow down like before. Anybody else experience this and know of a fix of some kind.

Thansk

 

[elkinm]

I used the cacheman mem recovery feature to free up some memory. It took 6 tries to restore the free ram to the usual 700+ setting. System cache dropped to under 200 mb in the process. Practicly none of the other indicators were effected by the recovery.

 

[Nothinman]

BTW, these 'ram manager' programs are a HORRIBLE idea in NT based systems. The NT kernal does an amazing job at managing memory, provided programs are coded properly, and in your case, it seems one wasnt.

They can't even work right because the only memory they have access to is the VM NT lets them see, the only way for something to see the real physical state of memory is to ask the kernel via some API MS provides or to run as a kernel level driver.

I personally think XP has a poor system cache algorithm, but have you done any 'tweaks' like setting LargeSystemCache or other things manually in the registry?

 

[elkinm]

No, largesystemcache is dissabled and the cache is set for program optimization and minimum cache. Is there any way to either dissable or limit the cache and see if that helps the problem.

Thanks