memory leak??

Josh Hillman ( (no email) )
Tue, 20 Jan 1998 10:06:28 -0500

I recently discovered a nasty memory leak in one of our servers and would
love to know if anyone's got a cure for it. At the moment, I have no idea
where it's coming from. The machine is a dual-Pentium 133 with 256MB RAM
and 64MB swapfile; NT 4.0 SP3 with some hot-fixes. It was last rebooted a
few days before Christmas '97. According to Task Manager, about 172MB are
being used (added all the memory being used by the processes), but it says
that 278MB of 309MB is being used.

I have 3 screenshots from Task Manager and NT Diagnostics while not running
any programs other than what's always running in the background:
http://www.talstar.com/support/temp/task-manager1.jpg
http://www.talstar.com/support/temp/task-manager2.jpg
http://www.talstar.com/support/temp/nt-diagnostics-memory.jpg

The primary applications that run on it are:
SQL Server 6.5 (SP3)
100MB of RAM is allocated to SQL (2*50000), though Task Manager
reports that 80 is actually being used.
The data part of the db is allocated 50MB of diskspace
The log is allocated 25MB of diskspace on a separate device
MS DNS
RadiusNT 2.2.41 (service)
Serv-U FTP (with srvany.exe)

Applications that I frequently run on this machine are:
Emerald 2.1.11 (crashes periodically, stating that "someusername"
is already in use; Invalid procedure call)
MSIE 3.02 (minimal usage)
MS Internet Mail
Windows NT Explorer
ISQL/w
Notepad, Wordpad, cmd, nslookup, whois, telnet

I just noticed that Emerald uses around 9MB of RAM, but when closed, the
memory usage only dropped about 6MB. I don't if this is "normal" or not,
but if not, I suppose opening and closing this day in and day out could
possibly account for the huge amount of memory that can't be accounted
for...

If anyone has and ideas, I'd sure appreciate it. I wouldn't consider the
constant rebooting of the server to be much of a cure for this...

Thanks,

Josh Hillman
hillman@talstar.com