Memory problems with an old server...

Joan M

Hello all, In our company we have two servers, one is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux without any problem, and the other one is running Windows XP Pro... (I know that this is not the best option, but it is how is it going...). We have some applications / services installed into that server. In fact, while the server is running I can see that the memory consumption is growing up little by little. Tomorrow I'll receive one more gigabyte of RAM and it will be an improvement as until now it has always being running using the page file continuously as it has only 256 MB (It's a really old server). The problem I have is that even if I have the extra GB it will arrive one day or another to the limit again. What I would like to know is: A) Is there any tool that could help me to find which software is causing the memory leak there? if I look at the processes I can see that no one is growing little by little. B) Can it be that the memory management of the XP Pro with SP3 working continuously with the page file have a bug or something? As always thank you in advance...

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Anna Jayne Metcalfe

You should be able to see this with PerfMon - I usually find the "Private Bytes" counter to be the most useful for detecting memory leaks. Once you 've identified the culprit, throw Memory Validator or BoundsChecker at it and you should be good to go. :)

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Lost User

A) The task-manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, jot down the memory-usage of the most suspected processes, go out for lunch, recheck when you're back. B) Not likely, what makes you think that? Probably a bad behaving application.

Joan Murt wrote:

I know that this is not the best option, but it is how is it going...

Why not suggest an alternative to management?

Lost User

May not be what you really need but give FreeRAM XP Pro a try, http://www.download.com/FreeRAM-XP-Pro/3000-2086_4-10070530.html[^]

Graham Bradshaw

When you look at the processes in Task Manager (as has been suggested), make sure that the 'Show processes from all users' option is checked. Then keep an eye on the figure in the Mem Usage column. It will be a long running process that's taking the memory. XP will clear up memory for any process when it terminates, so the problem process will be one that is running for a long time (most likely a service).

Graham Bradshaw

Looks a bit like software snake oil. Wild guess is that it calls SetProcessWorkingSetSize and EmptyWorkingSet.

Lost User

Graham Bradshaw wrote:

Looks a bit like software snake oil.

Could be. Don't use it myself but know some who have.

Millennium Knight

We had a similar issue with a server in our restaurant. He was getting up in years and becoming forgetful. He would insist on taking orders from customers and not writing it down immediately. People that ordered steaks would get shakes delivered. Fries would come back as apple pies. It was a real mess. We finally replaced the old server with a fresh one from Hooters. She is much more popular with the customers. :-D :laugh: (Sorry, this is in the Lounge, so I couldn't resist)

Mike Dimmick

All RAM optimizers are snake oil.

"Multithreading is just one damn thing after, before, or simultaneous with another." - Andrei Alexandrescu