Jamie's Random Musings on Video IM
Having spent a good part of the last year struggling with a variety of video chat and IM programs, I have decided to write a few things down and see what other people have to say about them.
Thursday 17 April 2008, 1:39 PM
Vista Memory Leak?
I'm wondering if anyone else has seen anything that looks like a memory leak in Vista? I've been running Vista Business on my Lifebook S6510 for several weeks now, and overall I'm pleased - at least pleased enough to keep it this time, rather than retreating to XP Pro again. But I've started to notice a correlation between some odd behavior of the laptop and steadily increasing memory use, so before spending a lot of time trying to track this down, I'm hoping someone else has seen the same thing.
I keep the standard Vista CPU Meter gadget running in the Vista Sidebar all the time. When I boot Vista, once everything settles down it shows memory use of about 40% (I have 3 GB installed). As I do my normal work over a period of a day or two, and generally across several sleep/resume cycles, the memory use slowly climbs until it gets to around 70%. I have then stopped all of the user programs that I have running, and even stopped the Internet Security program that I use, and the memory use only goes down by 3% or so. I have checked the memory use for remaining processes in the Windows Task Manager, and while a couple of things are using noticeably more memory than they were at boot (dwm.exe and explorer.exe, for example), nothing is using anything near the amount it would take to account for the increase shown by the CPU Meter.
So, before I break out the more serious tools, does anyone know about Vista itself, or any of the standard system processes, having a memory leak?
jw 17/4/2008
Previous
