XP and explorer.exe - memory leak proof?

jasonl99

Member
Nov 16, 1999
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I've seen several other people have problems with XP and explorer.exe. In my case, every few days, I get an incredible slowdown, and explorer.exe has suddenly started consuming 95-99% of cpu time, and 25+ megs of ram.

One of the nifty new features in XP's task manage is the ability to select which fields you want displayed on the "Processes" tab. Well, lo and behold, when I added "page faults" as a column to display, I find that explorer.exe is causing 1-5 page faults every second.

It's my understanding that a page fault occurs when memory that a program is requesting from the VMM isn't currently in ram and must be loaded from disk. Currently, explorer.exe has had 94,600 page faults on my machine and counting. It was rebooted less than 24 hours ago.

Why would this be happening?
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
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Page faults happen for multiple reasons, not just because the process is looking for data in swap.

I'm on a machine (not mine, I won't run XP) and explorer has 653614 page faults and the box appears to be up for ~5 days (not sure cause MS still doesn't ship an uptime util).

Oh and that feature in the Task Manager has been around for every version of NT I've ever used, it's not really new.
 

Finsti

Junior Member
Mar 13, 2001
13
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I have that problem too occasionally.

I usually kill the explorer process and logoff / logon again.
 

Panther505

Senior member
Oct 5, 2000
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Nothingman-

Here is a utility that MS provides to get uptime from multiple systems as long as you have Admin privs

MS Link

I use it in a batch format to get the uptimes of all of the systems that I am responsible for at work. This way I know if another Admin has rebooted a system and can go find out why. Also if a system BSODs and reboots then I know and I can go look at the minidump (some of the HW is developmental)
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
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I know there is such a utility but this isn't my box and I'm not adding things to it for no real reason.