Memory hogging.
 

My four year old laptop (Medion Pentium dual-core 1.60GHz T2060, 1GB DDR2 RAM Vista Home Premium SP2) is used almost exclusively for surfing such places as PPRuNe and other Google searches.

I upgraded the memory to 2GB (Crucial) to overcome the bogging-down that resulted from extended surfing sessions with multiple (Firefox) windows open.

Last night it ground to a halt during a PCGuard anti-virus scan.
Firefox was occupying almost 500,000K despite me closing as many windows (with little effect on that figure) and RPS.exe had over 800,000K when things 'seized'.
Cancelling RPS.exe was the only way forward (other than a forced reboot).

My question is:-
Why do applications 'accumulate' memory yet not clear it when windows are closed? I'm talking specifically about Firefox, but the same seemed to be true (and to greater extent) about RPS.exe and how can I force these to give up this memory (other than closing them)?

Other processes that seem to hog memory include svchost.exe (two separate chunks of 66,500K and 34,784K and 11 other entries in Task manager totalling 120,500K!) and TeaTimer.exe (34,412K) with dwm.exe at 17,848K.

As an observer - not as an antivirus 'expert' - it seems to me that a successful product will add bells and whistles until it gets so big that it takes over one's little world.

Hence, Norton's has lost a lot of (paid) customers in the last few years; AVG (free and paid-for) seems to be getting bigger and bigger - so much so that many are - for now abandoning AVG and going to Avast! (that includes me.)

Briefly Googling RPS seems to indicate that it, too, is now seeking to achieve world supremacy... a hint of that here: rps.exe Windows process - What is it?

"It is a Antivirus+Firewall Package provided free from NTLworld.com for all its broadband costumers, this should not be much of a problem but does take a liking to hog all of your ram from time to time. "

Is this the only AV program you have running? If you have another running as well, then there's your answer... if not, it seems worth trying an alternative. My Avast! (free) seems to be using less than 10 Megs at this time. But I'm sure that there are others just as frugal and powerful.

Bloatware Bloatware Out Out Out! :)

I run Avast and superantispyware together, no problems they co-exist quite happily and cover different things. I suggest you get rid of RPS.exe and use those 2.

Another happy Avast user.

Try downloading What's Running from Welcome to WhatsRunning.net! The home of What's Running, your system information utility! and see if that gives you any clues (shows a lot of detail).

Memory leaks
 

"Why do applications 'accumulate' memory yet not clear it when windows are closed? "

Badly written applications - a running application will request a memory allocation, use it and should then deallocate it when done.

Failure to deallocate (and an app like FF may have many threads that are constantly asking for memory, using it and releasing it) leads to a "memory leak" - more and more memory allocated but not released, until things slow down to a crawl or crash.

Having said that, in languages like C and C++ which do not have automatic "garbage collection" it is easy to miss or fail a memory deallocation unless you are testing very rigorously.

Earlier versions of FF were notorious for memory leaks but it is now pretty good - upgrade to a newer version.

See Memory leak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

:ok:

Mac

Not really memory hogging / memory leak, but FF & Thunderbird started taking more then 5 seconds to shut down. For a while I thought it was a memory leak. I finally installed ZoneAlarm and discovered that Macrovision was the culprit. It somehow got into my system and seemed to be phoning home. I set ZoneAlarm to deny Internet access for Macrovision and FF and TB became like the "olden days".

My 7 year old Latitude x200 started running very slowly a month or so ago. Then I started getting 'memory warnings'. Checking the C-drive, I found only 200Mb left. So I deleted a few applications and everything seemed fine.

Then it happened again. This time I knew that I hadn't added any new applications or even any new files - everything was on an external drive.

I had a look and found 2 culprits. One was Vodafone's 'vpclog' which hadn't self-deleted and was around 3Gb in bloat. The other? You guessed it - Norton Anti-virus.

After deleting the Vodafone crap, I contacted Norton on-line support and showed them the thousands of 'slu' and 'tmp' files with which their program had corrupted my computer. After 'some words', they used the 'Norton removal tool' and cleared all their junk off my C-drive, then gave me a gratis copy of Norton Anti-virus 2010 for the remainder of my subscription period. All of a sudden, the old x200 woke up and became as good as ever once again.

I now use it as a back-up (the lid has gone all floppy...:hmm:), having bought a nice new Vostro 3300 to use as primary. But it's still going well - all I have to do now is to get my old back up (Latitude D400) computer working again. If I power it up, it comes up with 'unmountable boot volume' and other geek-speak, so my god-daughter's hubby who is a City IT whizz has offered to sort it out as I still have all the system disks and Windows XP disks etc..... It was always slow - and I suspect that it, too, has been contaminated with Norton-bloat...:ugh:

Pound to a pinch of poo that most 'memory loss' is down to an anti-virus program...:uhoh:

Ditch Firefox and go with Chrome. Chrome will release the memory each time you close a tab (which for me is not that often ;) ). I find the speed of browsing better on Chrome as well.

FYI - I use browsers 6-8 hours a day for work, I've tried Opera, IE (=:mad:), Firefox, Safari and more...Chrome is really standing out, especially since there are now so many addons!

I'm sure that you are correct. In my case I have, over the years (three) succumbed to various recommendations to install and use several security programmes.

I'm not worried about these occupying space on the C-drive - I still have a third available unused - but the use of RAM (and CPU) as each checks my actions (or merely idling in the background).

How much is necessary is like any security and insurance - some will operate will the minimum whilst others will have belt and braces (sometimes un-necessarily) and I accept that there are different opinions as to what is 'essential'.

I have no doubt that I have significant redundancy in my 'protection', and some slowing of activity is acceptable, however, what brought this to a head was complete freezing of activity due to the direct activity of one programme carrying out a 'deep scan' at a time when I was actively browsing, and, together, these two activities locked-up more memory than the original 1GB supplied as standard with my computer - I had doubled this to avoid such situations, though this had not worked!

Looking down Task Manager I can see numerous activities that run and it is puzzling as to which are necessary and which could be dispensed-with - especially as some have identical names (such as svchost.exe). Stopping some may have disastrous effect whilst others could be halted without effect - the question is, which?

Currently I can see two svchost.exe entries 'hogging' 50,000K and 40,000K respectively as well as another at 17,000K and several at 4,000K/5,000K and others at 2,000K . . .

TeaTimer.exe is occupying 34,500K, RPS.exe 21,800K, and sp_rsser.exe also 21,800K (all three being protection programmes - Spybot, PC Guard and Spyware Terminator).

Firefox is 'using' 300,000K.


.

Me thinks something is rotten in your M/C, my process explorer
shows the following:

http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i1...ld/procexp.jpg

edited to add: if you hover the mouse pointer over the high svhosts, it'll tell which processes it controls.

Process Explorer screen grabs
 

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c1...sExplorerA.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c1...sExplorerB.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c1...sExplorerC.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c1...sExplorerD.jpg

Any comments and observations welcome.

Considering you have 38 odd windows on the go, I would suggest it's all running pretty well.

By 38 windows - do you mean within browsers (I'm watching NASA TV through IE and RealPlayer as well as various Firefox windows), or are you referring to all the 'automatic crap' which just seems to happen whether I am browsing or not?

Much of what goes on 'just happens' (like sh!t) and I'm uncertain whether to kill things or leave them to fester.

4 'Paint' windows of course to capture the screen grabs, and a 'Notepad' window to store the Photobucket URLs - oh, and 6 Windows Explorer windows to view photographs downloaded from my camera. Windows Task Manager and Process Explorer.

23 instances of Firefox?? You need to close a few things down. You have so many windows running simultaneously, I'm amazed the thing hasn't crashed.:uhoh:

Only seems to be a problem when 'deep' scans are being done by anti-virus programmes . . .

I've been doing that for years (five at least).

Well, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it's not the way I would run my system.

Out of interest, why would you need to have 20 plus firefox sessions running concurrently?

There is no way I would ever consider running SpywareTerminator and System Protect and S&D's teatimer.
You have far too much overlapping protection programs. They are likely to at best increase the time taken for any one process, due to multiple checks, and at worst, interfere with each other and cause problems.

One of my own cases, from a couple of years ago, I installed System Protect and it appeared to work fine, without drag. (I was also a bit of an enthusiast of SpywareTerminator at the time; no longer.)
After the first patch Tuesday following, I was unable to install/uninstall certain software from MS. Repeated attempts failed to install or remove, yet the "your computer needs updates" yellow icon kept alerting me. Long story short, I posted at an MVPS help forum and System Protect was found to be the cause.

My advice? Get rid of it.
And get rid of either Spyware Terminator or Spybot. (Personally I'd do without them both, and download a good demand scanner like MBAM.)

Not much on the web about your AV, either criticisms or glowing praise. Consider a different one.

Thanks, Tarq57 - my system has just grewed like Topsy with programmes added ad hoc following recommendations from various sources
Maybe (probably) I'll bite the bullet and clear out some of the dross as you suggest.

If your system is that overgrown, starting again with formatting the HDD and reinstalling the OS is probably a better way to go than a bit of pruning here and there.

SVCHOST is the "servicing app" for a whole raft of stuff in the operating system. I've looked a few times when memory's getting tight to see what exactly is using up stuff, and a couple of times I've disabled stuff that runs automatically. On the whole, there's not a lot you can zap without removing some functionality that you'll probably want.

Certainly, Norton was a major offender on mine - that's now long gone.

The other "pain in the neck" on my two Windows machines is Apple. That loads all kinds of stuff into memory, mostly to phone home and check for updates, or to sit and watch in case I plug in an Ipod. I now kill that (it takes about three goes via MSCONFIG, but it will eventually give up). When I want iTunes - about once in three months - I start it manually then plug in the device. Afterwards, I have to go through the kill routine again to zap iTunes, Quicktime, and some "helpers". I also have to put up with it inviting me to try various other Apple software that I don't want.

iTunes is also abominably slow, probably to teach me that I really need a Mac. No chance!

also clean the junk out regularly i've been using cr@p cleaner for years

www.ccleaner.com

To my mind, in the same category as Apple (perhaps slightly worse, if anything) is the Real Player.
This gets removed from my system toot sweet. A very suitable replacement can be found at free codecs dot com (also available at several mirrors, including File Hippo. The player looks a little sixties, but it works, is light, and doesn't spread tendrils through all the nooks or crannies, pester you for more toys, or ask if it's bum looks big.
A version is also available for the files the Apple player takes care of.

Realplayer i dont have a problem with, i just disable it from the start up registry, but then i hardly use it anyways..

the one that sticks in my craw is symantec products.. banned from all my computers they perpetually run in the background and the frigging symantec updater is a pest. all symantec/norton products are removed from any system 'tout suite'.. The anti-virus is useless... previously i stumped up for the corporate edition, what a waste that was, and it wasnt cheap either..

.. ended up with more viruses than 10 dollar crack whore. AVG does a better job.

Kaspersky rules !

Jeez, Wayne, I know how to spell tout suite.
I'm from the antipodes.
We take the piss out of anything.

awww heck and i held back on sheep jokes ! :E

What Mac The Knife said!

But, in furtherance to that: there is no way to reclaim memory which was supposed to be deallocated by any given app aside from rebooting your system. The improperly deallocated RAM will remain in Limbo, so to speak.

Mac: later version of FF are indeed better at handling RAM BUT I still often see a huge memory print when opening and closing several tabs, over extended periods of usage. And closing FF does not always free up the RAM it was using. I think Mozilla as an organization needs to expend more resources in addresses FF's memory demands. (This is not the behavior I see when using Apple's Safari though!)

Wrong.

If an application is leaking memory then killing that application will free up the memory, given any sane operating system, which all the ones you're likely to come across are, mostly. The operating system knows what memory is assigned to any application and frees up that memory when the application terminates even if the application doesn't do it for itself.

It's only if something in the operating system itself, rather than an application, is leaking memory that you're likely to need a reboot.