Vista - System Locks - aka another memory issue.

System is 1 month old.
Gateway FX6800 6Gb Ram, i7 CPU

System locks up every 3 days +/- or so.
System is now approx. 2 hours since reboot. TM reports.

Physical: 6134
Cached: 4299
Free: 34

Physical Memory Usage show 2.1Gb/35%

Over the course of the 3 days the amount of Physical Memory Used will grow to 5.5Gb+ at which time the system slows down to a crawl and the system needs to be rebooted.

There are 3 users with accounts on the system and all stay logged in 100% of the time. Switching between users as necessary. Early warning of the system needing to be rebooted is the system taking 10+ minutes to switch between users.

If I add up the reported (in TM) Working Set of RAM for all of the running applications it adds up to only a fraction of the amount of physical memory reported as being used.

I at first thought the problem was related to Norton 360. But after uninstalling/reinstalling it several times and eventually leaving it uninstalled the problem is still there.

Any thoughts or steps I should take to help diagnose?

Thanks

Hello unplugged, welcome to Vista Forums!



How many GB of RAM is the mobo rated at?

















Later Ted

Sounds like a straight memory leak. Perfmon is an excellent tool for that sort of troubleshooting (run PERFMON). Since it takes several days for the problem to manifest itself in actual symptoms, you'd want to start a perfmon log so that the relevant counters can be examined afterwards. The objects to log:

- MEMORY
- PROCESS
- PROCESSOR
- SYSTEM

If you configure the log to capture all instances of all counters under those 4 objects say every 15min, the log will provide useful data by the time the box starts underperforming.

The first thing to check would be "Memory\Committed Bytes", "Memory\Pool Paged bytes" and "Memory\Pool Non-paged bytes". If the first of those is showing a gradual increase, it should be attributable to one of the "Process\Private bytes" instances (one of the processes is leaking). If it's the pool counters which are showing appreciable growth, that's a bit more complex so let's cross that bridge when we come to it

MoBo is rated up to 12Gb as per Gateway's web site.
Current populated with

"6144MB 1066MHz DDR3 Three Channel Memory"

comprised of 3 x 2Gb

I started to play with perfmon. I will try to set up the logging you suggest and then repost after I have some data.

Thanks

Hello again.



Yes, please keep us informed!

















Later Ted

I ran perfmon and logged the requested data for two 12 hour periods. The "problem" happens quicker than I thought.

Last night between midnight and 8AM with nobody using the computer the Physical RAM number used went from 42% to 64%.

By the end of today I will need to reboot again.

So I have the logs but don't know exactly what I should be looking for. Committed Memory appeared to rise over time. But how do I trace that back to what is causing it. I also noticed this morning and this may be normal but in TM there is a counter for "Handles" This number was at approx. 1,250,000 and just steadily climbing.

Hello again.


I'm not too sure about memory leaks; maybe if I bump this for you someone that knows more than me will see it and have some ideas for you.

















Later Ted

BFK, Thanks but I think I solved it or at least now how to control it.
I was able to track the 1,800,000 file handles back to a program called "SmartCopy"

Which was opening file handle after file handle.

Killing the process freed up several gigs of ram and stopped the incremental rise.

I don't know why this program is doing this but I took it out of startup so I should have the issue again unless I want to run that program for some reason.

Thanks for your help.

Let us know if that fixes the problem for you

Yes, keep us informed







Later Ted