High memory consumption

C

chuckles1066

New Member
Firstly, just tried to log in to this site and got a "you have exceeded the maximum number of logins allowed" error and I had to then go through a picture validation sequence.

Um, nope, this is the first time I've tried to log in here since the last time I was here.

Secondly, I'm running Eraser 6.08.2273 on Win 7 64 bit.......see the screen capture at http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/5243/brokeneraser.jpg

Eraser isn't even doing anything, it's just sat in my system tray, I have no jobs scheduled so I don't really know why it needs to leech 317,000k of my memory?

I've uninstalled it for now but I'd be interested in what you think might be causing it......the system is clean of viruses and malware/spyware.
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

It has to be an issue with the runtime (which, in true Microsoft style, is blaming Eraser). On my Windows 7 system, the Eraser 6 running process takes up about 6,200K. As .NET does it's own garbage collection, the Eraser code cannot cause a memory leak. I'm afraid this one is for Joel; I cannot be more help than that.

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Thanks for the reply.

Alas, there's an embarrassing silence from up on high so I'm afraid Eraser stays uninstalled as it's clearly been found with its fingers in the proverbial cookie jar.

317k indeed.......what does Eraser think it is, a Microsoft product? :roll:
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

We need to get a couple of things straight.

Joel does what he does for Eraser voluntarily (no pay, no freebies, just public service). If, from time to time, the rest of his life gets in the way of the work on Eraser, that is (1) only to be expected and (2) part of the price we all pay for having free, open source software. I don't know when Joel will be back on the forum; in the meantime, the great majority of Eraser users have a usable free application in a field which is not exactly crowded with alternatives.

Secondly, the point I was making is that the issue has to be with your installation of the .NET framework, because that is what handles memory management. The .NET functions ascribe the use to Eraser, but, if something is wrong, there is (as far as I know) nothing in the Eraser code itself that can affect the issue one way or the other; that is how Microsoft designed .NET. If my (and other users') memory usage were the same as yours, that, perhaps would be an Eraser issue, but that is not the case.

Of course, there was a design decision to use .NET as the Eraser runtime; this decision is explained in the FAQ post on Eraser architecture (and is in any case now irreversible). In my experience, all runtime libraries have memory management issues of one sort and another, and the more recent versions of .NET are better behaved than some others. Indeed, if the system has no immediate use for the memory, it my just not have released it yet. The real issue is not how much memory is, or is claimed to be, in use, but whether there is any degradation of system performance resulting from that usage.

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

DavidHB said:
We need to get a couple of things straight.

Joel does what he does for Eraser voluntarily (no pay, no freebies, just public service). If, from time to time, the rest of his life gets in the way of the work on Eraser, that is (1) only to be expected and (2) part of the price we all pay for having free, open source software. I don't know when Joel will be back on the forum; in the meantime, the great majority of Eraser users have a usable free application in a field which is not exactly crowded with alternatives.
Click to expand...

No need to get anything straight, I am aware of the great committment shown by people like Joel who selflessly devote great chunks of their personal time to creating a product for free. If my post suggested otherwise then, of course, I am deeply apologetic.

DavidHB said:
. The real issue is not how much memory is, or is claimed to be, in use, but whether there is any degradation of system performance resulting from that usage.

David
Click to expand...

I have 6 gig of RAM in this machine and, yes, I could tell when the leeching was occuring; not only in system degradation but because my pc sounded like an aircraft about to take off :(

As far as I am aware, my .NET installation is generic?
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Sorry, my last post came out a bit more grumpy than I intended. :oops:

chuckles1066 said:
I have 6 gig of RAM in this machine and, yes, I could tell when the leeching was occurring; not only in system degradation but because my pc sounded like an aircraft about to take off :(
Click to expand...
Did you use Task Manager or another tool to look at the actual numbers? The increased noise from your machine was probably the processor (or perhaps a case) fan kicking in; increased temperature can be a sign of greater hard drive activity (i.e. use of the paging file), but without the memory usage figures it's a bit difficult to track the problem down. Conceivably, a hard drive is getting a bit hot just because Eraser is working it hard (e.g when doing a large erase or erasing free space), and memory usage is actually normal.

chuckles1066 said:
As far as I am aware, my .NET installation is generic?
Click to expand...
Well, you'd think so. But a fair proportion of the issues reported on the forum have a broken or damaged runtime as the cause. In my experience, this isn't an issue just with Eraser or just with .NET; other applications and runtime libraries can have the same kind of problem. And, as I said, any memory management issues have to be ascribed to the runtime, because applications that use .NET are not allowed to manage memory for themselves.

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Hi

I've the same problem as described above, a lot of memory usage and something like >500 threads created...

zuschneiden27.png


I'm also using the latest version of eraser but I'm on Windows XP SP3 all patches.
If you need my help to reproduce the problem feel free to contact me.

Best regards
Steffen
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Thanks, Steffen. The documentation is useful.

As I said in earlier posts, I know of no way that the Eraser code as such could produce this, as .NET handles all memory management. On my Windows 7 system, the Eraser process when Idle uses about 17MB, so your result is clearly an aberration.

Do you have any other applications installed that use .NET; if so, what results do they give?

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Apologies, I can't see your screenshots, I'll have to extrapolate from your descriptions.

The only known (and proven) cause of such a "leak" would be a task with a log which has... ballooned (pick gas of choice here. Hopefully none sulfur-containing :P) The remedy would then be to delete the affected task, or clear the log from the task. I've also observed that memory consumption is proportional to the size of the Eraser task list. The larger the task list, the greater the memory consumption.

So, let's have a look at that first before we start turning into Microsoft :)
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Joel said:
I've also observed that memory consumption is proportional to the size of the Eraser task list. The larger the task list, the greater the memory consumption.
Click to expand...
Is that also true when the Eraser process is running idle in the background, and not executing a task?

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Yes, the task list is completely loaded to memory upon start up... explaining the high memory consumption for large task lists. Individual tasks are small, but the logs which accompany them are not.
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

My task list contains exactly one task with 2 entries.
I've seen that on start-up of eraser there's normal memory usage and the threads and memory consumption blows up when the tasks are executed.
When the memory and threads are on the described level there's no possibility to kill the process, not with standard task manager, nor process explorer or pskill!
You can only shut down the system, which takes a long long time because Windows itself seems to have problems to kill the process!
If you need more details, please feel free to contact me. I'm also available in freenode with the nick jaeckel or in #libtom

Best regards
Steffen
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Just to be sure, try deleting or renaming the Task List file, so that Eraser creates a new one, and seeing what happens.


David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

DavidHB said:
Well, you'd think so. But a fair proportion of the issues reported on the forum have a broken or damaged runtime as the cause. In my experience, this isn't an issue just with Eraser or just with .NET; other applications and runtime libraries can have the same kind of problem. And, as I said, any memory management issues have to be ascribed to the runtime, because applications that use .NET are not allowed to manage memory for themselves.

David
Click to expand...

Well, I've installed the beta 6.1 version from 4th January, Eraser is sitting nicely at 22324kb and my pc isn't sounding like a US aircraft firing up.

Same .NET installation.

So something in the code changes between versions has fixed the bug.

:D
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Well, as previously indicated, it can't really be the code, because, under .NET, that is not actually allowed to handle memory. My guess is that the new installation fixed whatever the installer did wrong last time. But we'll never know for sure.

At least it's working now ... :)

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

It would look like it's a task list issue, most likely the unused space erasure with cluster tip erasures enabled which generate plenty of log messages.
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Hi there,

with the latest beta it even got worse!



It's memory usage grows up to the shown 1.7GB and usage of ~1750 Threads and then the .net Framework crashes!
Any advice?

Steffen

P.S. Besides that Eraser seems to have problems on my PC I'm missing the feature that recurring tasks can be executed at Reboot.
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Presumably, when you upgraded, Eraser deleted the old Task List, because that It's what it normally does. If so, that makes Joel's suggestion a less likely cause.

Personally, I still think you have a problem with your .NET installation. It seems as though it isn't handling memory as it is supposed to do. If it were me, I'd Google for details of how to uninstall and reinstall .NET 3.5.

David
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Could you get a full memory dump of the process and send it over to me? Perhaps a file-sharing site may be of use here.
 
Re: A couple of Eraser problems!

Joel said:
Could you get a full memory dump of the process and send it over to me? Perhaps a file-sharing site may be of use here.
Click to expand...
It's a pity that I can't now reproduce the problem. I would send you the full dump of memory when Eraser 6.0.8 occupied more than 7Gb of memory!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top