XP Pro SP3 memory leak, or is it?

Hi, first post so I hope I explain this as I got lost trying to read and understand XP memory management on my Intel quad core PC.

I have my hard drives running on SATA. They have lots of files with some big video files. A persistent problem I have is with XP search. It starts, finds what I need then carries on until the App freezes and I have to do Ctrl/Alt/Del to shut it down. Until recently I saw no other hints of instability.

Then last week I had to copy a lot of 3-5Gb video transport stream files (400Gb total) from internal SATA to External SATA (but the problem is still there internal-internal). This was a heavy IO operation. The cpu cores were not showing anywhere near being maxed out.

The copy kept failing, but could be restarted. I had calculated the whole operation would take at least 2-3 hours but on each failure, I got Windoze 'out of resources errors'.

I started looking for memory leaks using poolmon.exe analyzed by Pool log analyzer tool. Yes I appear to see memory leaks and the paged pool tag increasing over time.

I decided to run MSconfig and put the system into diagnostic mode loading only XP's minimal drivers, anybody can do this.

Then I started a file search for file xz!@ whilst capturing the pool tags several times. This was only a short test, but mirrors what I see happening with longer file copying a steady increase in apparent pool paged memory.

Pool log analyzer says MmSt and NtfF are leaking. Can anybody else tell me if this is normal behaviour and leaking 'YES' means there is not a leak or what? If I suspected a 3rd party driver I would be looking for it and would not expect it to be loaded in diagnostics mode when only Windoze drivers should be present.

I have a working knowledge of XP systems, but memory management and how it works leaves me struggling.

Thanks

 

http://www.winability.com/why-cant-i-copy-large-files-over-4gb-to-my-usb-flash-drive/

read this, are your drives formatted ntfs?

I do not understand memory management. I have just googled a query on out of resources error in xp while copying large files.

this may help you,

if not process explorer, might:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Process Explorer

 

Thanks, all drives are formatted NTFS. I got bogged down in memory management, it is a really techi area.

What would be nice is if somebody with an XP machine who knows poolmon.exe and the MS pool log analyzer tool can tell me if they get a clean report when booted into the minimal XP drivers diagnostics mode and then doing a file search. If ok, then I know the SP3 NT drivers are not the problem and I am looking at the hard drive setup. I have my main C_Drive with parallel ATA connected through a serial SATA and the rest are SATA. I could try imaging that drive on to a SATA and see if I get the same problem.

I never really understood the problem of memory leaks. On home machines the processing times are relatively short between re-boots unless you are doing heavy file and IO work as in Hi Def video editing. Mostly it seems those managing servers running 24/7 have run up against memory leaks.

I read there was a problem on the server 2003 version, but SP3 Hotfixes were supposed to fix them.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/177415

http://rickteck.wordpress.com/2011/...oubleshooting-memory-leaks-with-sysinternals/

got the two above sites from googling how to use and interpret poolman.exe, maybe this can help you.

 

The problemo is solved as far as I can tell:

Not sure if this Hotfix KB969262 is included in SP3, but it seemed to have fixed my problem of the MS search application stalling when searching large drives with lots of filenames. The apparent memory leak during copying large files >3Gb over a couple of hours seems to have gone away. However, it seems that Poolmon needs to run for a while before you get stable results.

There is an 'apparent' leak at the start of testing, but as time goes on, the leak stops. Poolog analyzer looks at the start to finish of capture and if during this time memory is still being consumed and not released, it flags up a leak fault. If at some time after starting capture the memory use remains constant or drops, then no error is flagged which I think it is saying memory is being managed.

support.microsoft.com/kb/969262

 

thanks for the update and I am glad you have resolved your issue