WinXP long-uptime performance decrease?

[KingJackal]

I've never noticed it before - and on this uptime things were fine for the first couple or 3 weeks. But over the last few days, my system has really been chugging.

Today I started getting a strange 'lagging' like behaviour in games. Framerates remain high, and ping low - it feels very much like hard-drive paging, but memory usage is no more than usual ( and I've got 512MB of RAM - so that's rarely an issue ).

I've also noticed reduced multi-tasking capabilities. I found my framerates improved in-game when I turned off several background apps - despite those apps being low-priority processes ( and despite that never being an issue before ).

It's almost as if I have a memory leak in one of the apps I'm running...

Is there any way to find and repair a memory leak like that ( short of rebooting )? I'm just curious, because it's a rare thing to have an uptime this large - so if I reboot I'll never work out what it was, and/or how to fix it ;).

( uptime is currently 32 days and something.... )

[edit] yep - it's almost certainely a memory leak. With EVERY app closed ( only running OS, drivers and 1 task manager window ), I'm still burning up 209MB of pagefile :(.

[edit2] I just realised that because I shut everything down to check, that means the leak is either:
- in Windows
- in one of my drivers

:(

Having a look just through the Task Manager:

Explorer.exe :rolleyes:
58MB usage, 99MB peak, 9,536,451 Page Faults!!

*sigh*
Maybe the XP kernal isn't as good as I thought it'd be... :|

[cadmax]

odd *here me thinking that it was only me :p*

i have Explorer.exe crash every week or so :D
max up time for is 1 week 4 days (thats on my server)

[KingJackal]

Turns out those stats in explorer are normal ;).

It doesn't crash much.... it's just obviously getting a lot of thrashing in the background.

*sigh*

Well, I've restarted all my Windows services, to no avail. So it's now narrowed down to:
- device drivers
- OS KERNAL

....which basically means one of my drivers isn't behaving.

VIA 4in1's?
Dynalink TV-card drivers?
Razer mouse tray?
Hercules GTXP drivers?
nVIDIA Detonators?

( in order of likelyhood, hehe )

[Yuen]

I'm running WinXP Pro, and I'm the type of person who wouldn't really bother finding out what app was causing the memory leak ;)
If it lags bad, just restart :P

But yeah, just posted to let u know that it happens to me, too.

[Ragnor]

It stands to reason you can likely rule out the "latest" dets and via4in1's... If they were the cause I think many other uptime freaks would be reporting a similar problem. Also they are actively updated / maintained.

I'd say it would be your sound drivers or the dynalink drivers since those are the less actively maintained.

Alternatively, if presumably you haven't restarted for more then 30days, you haven't installed the latest windows updates?? which could include a patch for a problem like this?

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by Ragnor
Alternatively, if presumably you haven't restarted for more then 30days, you haven't installed the latest windows updates?? which could include a patch for a problem like this?

LOL - that's the main reason I restart every month or so... ;)

But no, so far the only updates since reboot have been security related.

And yeah, I've been wondering if I shouldn't just get rid of the Dynalink card...

./me ponders

The only problem is, it'll take at LEAST another month before I can find out whether or not that makes a difference.... :(

[Gremlin]

Try running any of the zillion memory "defraggers" around, it won't neccesarily show you whats causing the problem but might solve it without a reboot.

Just becuase you shut everything down doesn't always mean the leak has been caused by one of the programs still running, allocated memory can get orphaned and will stay that way even after the main task has been closed. This is basially what the some of those memory defraggers do, they look for allocated memory that no longer has a running thread associated with the allocation pointer.

[AcurA]

Just had to add something to see if i can mark this post as read (s'been buggin' me)!! for those having the same probs... u know what i'm talking about.

[edit]... and it worked!

[-=DEI[]v[]OS=-]

Well I myself would probably look at the 4 in 1's ....what Ragnor said makes sense, but I used to have that problem with my old setup, but not with my new (granted my uptimes are only about a week or so)

The difference between my 2 machines....one's a chaintech (via chipset) and my current is an nForce2 motherboard .

[SledgY]

There are some commonly used dll's that have some nasty memory leaks. VBScript was known to have a real nasty one (that can be exposed by using classes) although this may have been fixed (from my testing one way of causing the leak has been) but there could be many others, and being an object used quite considerably in windows XP...

[KingJackal]

Having recently restarted, I noticed that explorer.exe memory usage alone has dropped from 55MB ish (with no explorer windows open!) down to 14MB ish!

....so maybe it was explorer :(.

Anyway, I've pulled out the Dynalink TVcard (the last driver release was 2 years ago - so yeah, suspect), installed Windows updates etc as well. Only because I know what to look for, hopefully I'll be able to get an idea in only 10-20 days time ;).

Interesting note about the VBscript, though I can't say that exactly surprises me... :rolleyes:

[fatsanchez]

i've noticed after upgrading to XP that it seems to get a bit dodgy after sometimes as little as 3 days, explorer will crash and need to be restarted, or things will start chugging.

2k was good for a week at least (at about 7 days, we'd either get a powercut or a game would kill it)

[KingJackal]

Yeah, there are a lot of 'features' that they've added/'improved' in XP that I try my hardest to kill.

Most of the bad one's stem from that nice-sounding-at-first idea of having a snoopy browser for files:

- Filetype specific file info ( sound length, ID3 tags etc for songs, resolution for pictures etc )
- Filetype specific previews ( thumbnail for images, thumbnail of first frame for video's etc )

BUT

....they've taken it overboard, and it's a dangerous option when it comes to stability with its current lack of flexibilty and extensibility.

For example, video thumbnails. Sounds innocent, but it isn't. It uses WMP to do the preview - and that's not changable. So if your WMP isn't set up for a certain filetype/encoding, then it won't work. Even worse, if your WMP has fatal errors when trying to render certain filetypes/encodings, then your explorer windows will crash!!! You can turn thumbnails off... but they don't always STAY off.... :(.

Anyway, STABILITY is compromised.

Again with video thumbnails, in order to draw the thumbnails, the video has to be read. This causes a HUGE amount of unneccissary I/O. For files that are ( if you're smart ) in a sensible folder and use a sensible filename, this is a redundant service.

PERFORMANCE is compromised.

Yet again with video thumbnails, if the video is high-bandwidth and you want to access it - say to cut and paste it ( not with WMP ), then you have to wait for the preview process to finish, as WMP has a read-lock on the file!!

CONTROL is compromised.

....I should stop now. Honestly, I could write a whole essay on how much of an ASS thumbnails is. It was cute when it came with Windows Me - but you NEED to be able to REMOVE it ( not just select it off for a certain folder, or off for directory templates - actions that often don't seem to be permanent ), or at least change the default renders for each filetype.

*sigh*

Guess where most of my 'explorer has encountered an error' messages come from? You guessed it, from times when it tries to preview DivX, even when I've previously told it to use ICON-view in that directory.... :rolleyes:

[dumass]

If its one thing i hate its previewing divx, its usless as 99% of the time it previews the black starting screen.

[Gremlin]

....so maybe it was explorer You realise you could have end tasked explorer and then just restarted it without rebooting eh ?

[Grrr!!]

Yeah, those thumbnails are evil. What really pisses me off is that you can't delete the file while the thumbnail is being generated.

And btw, if you think it's that bad, wait until your flattie opens your movies folder while you and another flattie are playing BF.

[cadmax]

/ExtremE
If you have a good video card with some detonators on it there is a option in the card properties under antialising there is a option to set thumbnail quality from
Performance - Normal - Quality

And im not sure where it is but there is a tweak (maybe toms hardware) that will set everypage in Explorer to what you want
So you can set every window to list or details threrefore wont display any thumbnails

Just my 2 cents

ExtremE :)

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by Gremlin
You realise you could have end tasked explorer and then just restarted it without rebooting eh ?

....oh but I did ;) ( and it didn't fix anything :( ).

Cadmax, chances are that detonator option just changes the Windows Folder option where you can choose over whether or not to cache thumbnails ( Tools -> Folder Options -> View - Advanced Settings in any Explorer window ).

...of course, caching doesn't help much when you have a folder with literally 100's of small video's, and the cache is slow to index :(.

[imdying]

KJ, the only way I've found to recover from said problem, and the runaway avi one for that matter, is to task manager -> and process tree. Only the 'end process tree' menu item seems to have far enough reaching effects to fix it :/

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by imdying
KJ, the only way I've found to recover from said problem, and the runaway avi one for that matter, is to task manager -> and process tree. Only the 'end process tree' menu item seems to have far enough reaching effects to fix it :/

o0o0o0o

Thanks for that - I've never seen that option before. I'll definately give it a try the next time a see a bloated process!! :)

[imdying]

doh... should read 'end process tree' :rolleyes: