RAM leaking -- like rats from a sinking ship!

Just a normal Dell desktop pentium 4 512M RAM with a few years of continuous use and a host a minor annoyances (sound stopped a month ago, won't scan, etc.). However, now you can see (in Task Mgr) the RAM increasing in most of all the processes continuously. No CPU drain. Example: the spooler service usually consumes 3-4M. Today after an hour it had reached 35M! Had a powerpoint presentation open for about 2 hours and it was approacing 800M of pagefile usage. The desktop (explorer.exe) had reached 68M, etc.. Needless to say, the box pretty much grinds to a halt at this point.

Anyone see this sort of behavior before? Know of a utility to run some tests?

Thank you!!

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d1247.html

http://www.majorgeeks.com/CDCheck_d579.html

 

I wouldn't sweat it; this is fairly normal.

Take explorer.exe for example. This program runs, and declares variables and functions, which consume memory.

Now, when you open windows explorer, and navigate to a file location, you're adding more to what explorer has to remember. Now, it has to keep track of where in the filesystem you are, the x and y coordinates of the window, the width and height of the window, etc. This causes explorer to declare more variables, and thus consume more memory.

Every interaction with a program is going to cause a change in the process' memory consumption. Firefox is another good example. When you open a tab and start surfing, that tab alone can remember 8 pages of history. Now, multiply that across several tabs, and that's alot of history for firefox.exe to keep track of. Many people have claimed that Firefox has a memory leak problem, but I really think they're referring to this phenomenon.

Its true that some programs might not be great at releasing the memory they consume upon termination, but windows itself is pretty good for catching that.

Edit: Heh, sorry nitecrawler! That's a great recommendation to test the RAM. Memtest86+ should be able to put your mind at ease that you're not suffering a hardware failure!

 

No probs Mada....I do believe your diagnosis is pretty much spot on though!
More than likely software factuals!!

good luck freeheelz....

 

Thanks Nitecrawler.... Making my boot disk now to run Memtest...

 

As you probably know, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, in XP, brings up Windows task manager.
Select the processes tab, and single click on Mem Usage. You can sort it to ascending or descending RAM usage. Minimise it and refresh it by presiing F5 and you will see how RAM usage varies with each program that you use or have running in the BACKGROUND. Bazza

 

No Ram errors reported by Memtest-86. I do have to disagree with Mada's diagnosis. If you review the initial post "the box grinds to a halt" does not sound like normal behavior. Also, a normal box will stabilize memory usage when idle. Yes it will increase slowly with more use, but this is out of hand. The print spooler with no printing pending should not jump to 40Meg from 6Meg along with most other windows processes. I have been able to stabilize it temporarily by disabling spysweeper update, java update, and quickbooks update.

 

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that your machine running slowly is normal behaviour, only that memory usage increasing is. I believe that we may be either pointing fingers at the wrong processes, or possibly that these processes have been spoofed/infected.

Recommend that you ensure the system is clean of malware by following the instructions in the malware removal thread. This will put your computer in a known state where we can begin troubleshooting this problem further.