Is there a deeply embeded memory leak in Vista?

Adam Albright · 10-05-2007

Seems like it. I can't prove it though. I've seen the same series of
events several times now over the course of the three months I've had
Vista installed.

Computer on all day, (this time about 13 hours), I'm doing my usual
things, everything seems fine. Then out of the blue the system first
slows down a little, then more then it starts to crawl over the space
of a couple minutes. You see all the teletale signs of something
eating up system resources. The keyboard first becomes slow to respond
then becomes almost totally non responsive. Anything on screen takes
forever to get redrawn. You can see image files that use to open
instantly now slowly scroll open taking seconds to complete, ditto for
text documents. Trying to open a new application that used to open in
a few seconds now takes minutes to open.

No, indexer isn't running. Neither is anti-virus or defrag.

I go to Task Manager and one by one close down my running
applications. I get to the point nothing but Windows itself is left
running. System hasn't improved performance at all. Still as sluggish
as a snail suffering from heat stroke. All kinds of crap, all Windows
crap seen in Resources monitor accessing my hard drive and CPU very
busy. Finally, in disgust I'm forced to shut down. Reboot, system
normal again.

Damn it Microsoft, can't you ever fix Windows so it actually works
like it is suppose to?

Charles W Davis · 10-05-2007

Damn it! It works perfectly on my computer. What are the specific problems,
preferably one post per issue. You could possibly get your system up and
running.
"Adam Albright" <AA@ABC.net> wrote in message
news:h90543dpiruspunnjd5c1krvqgedt6flfr@4ax.com...[color=blue]
> Seems like it. I can't prove it though. I've seen the same series of
> events several times now over the course of the three months I've had
> Vista installed.
>

Adam Albright · 10-05-2007

Oh wow, the always popular "it works on my computer" excuse.

Damn, so many useful idiots post here. How much more specific can I
get than saying nothing running but Windows and it is crawling after
being in use for 13 hours. Duh!

Double damn, when will people learn to READ? My system is up and
running, been so for months. I'm simply reporting ANNOYING issues that
keep croping up and no fanboy, no MVP, no MS employee is willing to
touch with a ten foot pole. I wonder why not. <snicker>

VistaTester · 10-05-2007

Vista loves to eat memory and resources. your best bet to get memory maager
like Memokit and you can find what is eating memory.. Also take a look at
the Reliability and Performance Monitor.

**AlbertGr** · 10-05-2007

i don't use IE, but Firefox, and no problems.

**AlbertGr** · 15-05-2007

For me also there seams to be a serious memory leak in Vista. You can easily test the leak when you keep track of explorer.exe with Taskmanager (pressing CTRL-SHIFT-ESC keys will activate the manager) and opening/closing windows by opening any folders. See how explorer.exe memory increase ? System won't give the cached memory ever fully back ! After every 2-3 days (depends on your Vista usage) the explorer.exe memory usage will be enormous, and Vista windows will not be able to show the contents of each window anymore. In the beginning I thought it was cached and Vista would give it back after a certain memory-usage limit is reached, but for me this is not the case. My only solution then is to kill explorer.exe. But then you will loose any Trayicons. I am curious if someone else can confirm or reproduce (or even solve) this Vista memory-leak.

**AlbertGr** · 16-05-2007

Originally Posted by Joseph Johnson

i don't use IE, but Firefox, and no problems.

AlbertGr <AlbertGr.2qmm3k@DoNotSpam.com> wrote in
news:AlbertGr.2qmm3k@DoNotSpam.com:
I am curious if someone else can confirm or reproduce (or
> even solve) this Vista memory-leak.
>
>

Using Firefox is not relevant for not having the leak, because the file explorer.exe is an integral component of the OS, it handles not only the browser IE, but also many other maintenence functions for the OS. Even if you use another browser, the memory usage size of explorer.exe keeps expanding when opening/closing folders in Vista.

**AlbertGr** · 17-05-2007

Update: I discovered that the background service of PGP 9.6 (Pretty Good Privacy, see http://www.pgp.com for information), that I purchased and installed, causes explorer.exe and the amount of resource handles to keep growing. As part of my search for the cause of the memory leak problem, I disabled all PGP Services (via the PGP Tray icon after a near fatal grow of handles (>32000) and explorer.exe was exploded to a mem usage of 232000 KB (thats 232 MB memory usage ONLY for explorer.exe), and amazingly the handles descreased immediatly to 19000. The explorer.exe memory was not decreased, but after killing and restarting the explorer.exe task, and not enable PGP services anymore, I see a much more stable memory usage of my system. Explorer.exe still grows, but it takes much more time than before, and it seems that memory is being given back to the OS now (although not always). I keep everyone informed of my Vista memory leak experiences without PGP services running.

**AlbertGr** · 22-05-2007

Interim status May 22th, 2007 08:00

After killing/restarting explorer.exe 4 days ago, explorer.exe mem usage has increased from 23450 KB (22 MB) to 105468 kb (102 MB) (increase factor 463%), and handles increased from +-19000 to 22083 (increase 16%). Slowly a rise in memory usage is visible. Is takes a time, but there is no way denying a memory leak is presenting itself. When opening Proces Explorer (c) Microsoft, and looking into explorer.exe, I see an increase in handles that belong to a "non-existing process", and ursurp memory that never will be given back to the OS.

So far the interim-result. I keep everyone posted.

Regards,
Albert

**AlbertGr** · 23-05-2007

My Vista has done an unwanted reboot at 3:00 AM becaused it installed itself an update. Now I can start again from the beginning with this test. I have changed the update configuration: now it will download updates, but ask for installation. I hope that installation will never be done automatically, otherwise I shall completely disable automatic Vista updates.

Anyway, I started the leak-test again. Values at start-time are:

2007-05-23 8:52
explorer.exe: 23408 KB
handles: 19628

During the test, I will only browse my system with explorer and internet with Firefox 2.0.0.3, and open/close folders while moving/copy files. Each day a will put the new explorer.exe mem-usage and handle amount in this thread for your information.