Windows 7 Memory Leak?

Oct 27, 2007
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http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1235
My conclusion? It’s alarming behavior if you’re unaware of what’s happening. But when you look more carefully, it’s arguably a feature, not a bug, and the likelihood that you’ll ever crash a system this way is very, very small and completely avoidable.
More alarmism from the tech media. This bug was never a truly serious issue.
 

hennessy1

Golden Member
Mar 18, 2007
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Thank you for the quick responses. Even though this might sound foolish this was one of my main reasons not to upgrade to windows 7.
 

RebateMonger

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Dec 24, 2005
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This article was from August, after first reports of the chkdsk memory issue. This issue was obviously being looked at. You'd THINK it would have been fixed if was causing problems on a lot of machines:

http://windows7center.com/news/windows-7-rtm-chkdsk-memory-leak-isnt-a-showstopper/

"Steven Sinfosky, president of the Windows division at Microsoft, left a comment on Chris123NT regarding this issue. He says that this is indeed not a showstopper and occurs by design.

In this case, we haven’t reproduced the crash and we’re not seeing any crashes with chkdsk on teh stack reported in any measurable number that we could find. We had one beta report on the memory usage, but that was resolved by design since we actually did design it to use more memory. But the design was to use more memory on purpose to speed things up, but never unbounded — we requset the available memory and operate within that leaving at least 50M of physical memory. Our assumption was that using /r means your disk is such that you would prefer to get the repair done and over with rather than keep working.

While we appreciate the drama of “critical bug” and then the pickup of “showstopper” that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level. Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC.

Sinofsky also stated that they are doing overnight stress testing of 40 machines to see if the problem can be reproduced."
 
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Nothinman

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Sep 14, 2001
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Thank you for the quick responses. Even though this might sound foolish this was one of my main reasons not to upgrade to windows 7.

Yes, quite foolish unless the primary use of your computer is to run chkdsk with the /r switch...
 

hennessy1

Golden Member
Mar 18, 2007
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I actually do run it quite often on other hard disks so it would be a valid concern for me.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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I actually do run it quite often on other hard disks so it would be a valid concern for me.

Except that it's not even really a problem in most cases since the BSOD mentioned in the Infoworld article wasn't reproducible. Sure, it'll cause more thrashing than you might expect since the extreme memory usage will cause Windows to evict what's currently running, but that's it.