Memory leak

N

Neotype33

New Member
There appears to be a memory leak in the latest version of Eraser. During and after a 3 pass wipe the system increases its memory usage to over 3GB total used and will not go down until I restart, while showing 70mb used by Eraser. After the restart Eraser displays only about 70MB in use, however Task manager shows a total of 1.5GB in use, but not showing what is using the memory. If I uninstall Eraser and restart, memory usage returns to normal.

Thanks in advance.

System Specs:
Core2 Duo 1.8Ghz
XP Pro SP3 - (Correction SP3 is loaded)
2GB Ram (1.3GB Free)
 
Whatever is happening, I doubt that it's a memory leak, as the term is normally understood. Eraser 6 uses the .NET runtime, which AFAIK handles its own garbage collection without program involvement.

Also, please could you say what you mean by the 'latest version'? Do you mean the current stable - 6.0.7.1893?

David
 
OK specifically:
Build Name Version Release Date
Eraser 6.0.7.1893 6.0.7.1893 14/4/2010 8:00am

Memory usage goes from about 900MB to 1.5GB when Eraser is installed alone. After uninstalling/ reboot it returns to normal. Once it is installed and I erase a file/ folder with a 3 pass (haven't tried any others) it ramps up to just over 3GB. After uninstalling/ reboot it returns to the normal 900MB range and holds. Uninstalled I never meet 1.8GB of memory used all day with my normal day to day use.

I have installed it 3 times with the same results over several days.

Are there incompatibilities with any software? PointSec, Mcafee, .net 3.5/4.0, Flux Capacitors, etc....

I had a very old version (Pre-slick interface/ red Biohazard icon and not sure what version; I don't have it handy and I'll have to see if I can dig it up if I can even find it still...) that worked fine on this same laptop around two years ago. I got a later version 6+ on my home system and thought it worked well and it added some extra features with schedules for erasing. (but my home system is a quad core extreme 3.0Ghz with 6GB DDR3 with 2 raptors in a raid 0 and 2 SSD drives in a raid 0)

Thanks!
 
I agree that it is odd. The Eraser running process won't account for this, as it starts on boot. The only thing I can guess is that some or all of the .NET runtime remains in RAM after Eraser has ceased working. Again guessing, that could be by (Microsoft) design.

Only Joel will know whether this is relevant, but the Eraser 6 spec says that it is compatible with XP SP3, rather than SP2.

David
 
Indeed it does sound like a .NET runtime oddity. Do however take the memory figures with a grain of salt. People (myself included) like lots of free RAM to boast but there are many indicators of memory utilisation. I believe that the main thing accounting for the memory consumption is the .NET runtime running, or any of its constituent parts (e.g. ngen.exe, which generates native images from .NET MSIL).

In any case, I wouldn't think too much about it as like you said, memory consumption reported by Task Manager (in this case, this is really the private working set) maintains at 70MB. I believe the extra memory is consumed by shared resources which are used across the system by all .NET applications. The memory usage of all processes in Task Manager do not add up to the total memory usage (if you were to do the Math) for this reason.
 
DavidHB said:
I agree that it is odd. The Eraser running process won't account for this, as it starts on boot. The only thing I can guess is that some or all of the .NET runtime remains in RAM after Eraser has ceased working. Again guessing, that could be by (Microsoft) design.

Only Joel will know whether this is relevant, but the Eraser 6 spec says that it is compatible with XP SP3, rather than SP2.

David
Click to expand...


I'm sorry, I was mis-quoted my system specs. SP3 is loaded on this laptop. I forgot it was updated in January to SP3. I just verified via properties on my computer.
 
Fair enough. In the absence of other evidence, I'm with Joel on this one. If you were Microsoft, and you wanted every Windows application there ever was to use the .NET framework, you'd make it resident in RAM after it starts up, wouldn't you? Only if there's evidence that it's actually slowing the system down should this be a worry.

David
 
DavidHB said:
Fair enough. In the absence of other evidence, I'm with Joel on this one. If you were Microsoft, and you wanted every Windows application there ever was to use the .NET framework, you'd make it resident in RAM after it starts up, wouldn't you? Only if there's evidence that it's actually slowing the system down should this be a worry.

David
Click to expand...

Well, technically it is killing the system. I only have 2GB of ram, without Eraser installed it only use about 800mb, with all my work applications open I use about 1.2GB. This said the application installed and with a simple erase of some password files it peaks over 3GB causing my system to use its pagefile. This makes the system already a 3 year old box unbearable. I have given up on Eraser 6 and have found my older copy Eraser 5.8.7 that works just fine.

I'm considering the issue closed as 6 is not compatible with my systems/ configuration. I was hoping there was a simple answer or known answer as to why Eraser 6 uses all my systems Ram and page file. Thanks for your time everyone.
 
Then I'm sorry. The only thing I can suggest is uninstalling/ reinstalling .NET in case that works.
 
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