Small business server memory leak

There is most likely a program that's not freeing up memory that it no longer needs. As a result, the program grabs more and more memory until it finally crashes your system because there is no more memory left.

There are memory leak detection tools available to help track them down. Three such tools are mtrace, memwatch and dmalloc. They are simple programs that find most errors.

Information on these tools and a download link may be found at the following URL:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6059

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You can diagnose most memory leaks with Performance Monitor and several Microsoft Windows 2000 Resource Kit utilities. Memory leaks in the System process are usually the result of an errant device driver; unfortunately, you can’t dynamically stop and start most device drivers, so driver leaks are difficult to find. With Performance Monitor, you can watch overall statistics for thread, pool, and paging file usage. You can also monitor these counters on an individual process basis (to identify the problem service or application). Diagnosing memory leaks in services or applications is an interactive process that can take days and can use several performance-monitor profiles.

Increasing the size of the paging file provides a solution, albeit temporary. A larger paging file gives the system a little longer to run before exhausting the space in the extended or secondary paging file.

Here is a link to a LabMice Web page that has over a dozen links to Windows 2000 Magazine and Microsoft articles describing the different sources and possible resolutions for memory leaks.

http://www.labmice.net/troubleshooting/memoryleaks.htm

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This may be a case of trial and error – try one thing, and if it doesn’t work go on to the next.

Good luck,

Maxwell

An answer you may wish to use is the lazy option I apply to every MS Windows system that I build.

All MS Windows systems suffer from memory leakage, some worse than others. I always install a memory managment / clearance program called MemTurbo (www.MemTurbo.com) and set it to run automatically when ever the alarm level is reached. this means that periodically through the day the machine will slow down whilst this process runs but it will not stop or need rebooting due to this problem provided you set the alarm level at a reasonable height. i usually set between 10 to 25 MB depending upon the system.

I use an early version that was put out as a Freeware trial version, the latest versions are much better and are very cheap for a business situation.

There are other applications that do the same thing, with names like FreeMem etc. A google search on Memory Managers will give you a lot to look at.

I first found this application when Win 98 was very new and 32 MB RAm was standard, system kept locking up until I put this one. haven't had a memory leakage lock up since.