Available resources/memory problem in XP? PART II

[Mark]

The person below originally posted this question. I too am having the
same issue on my XP machine, where I have several APPS open and a
bunch of explorer windows, and at some point I try to open another
explorer or IE and it wont load or it will load but be blank, until I
close something else (with only 350mb out of 1024 mb used on physical
side!)

I also tried killing every process in taskmanager that I could but
this didnt fix the issue.

I dont know what could be causing the leak, I also watched the sizes
in the meter, but nothing was too obvious (some had used up 54mb of
memory or 2000 GDI's though).

Any quick fixes for this?

Thanks


=====================
From: msnews.microsoft.com ([email protected])
Subject: Available resources/memory problem in XP?
View: Complete Thread (8 articles)
Original Format
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Date: 2003-07-29 11:39:14 PST


Hi, I have been encountering a problem with Windows XP that looks much
like
the problems that are well documented about Windows 9x, in that after
heavy
use, it appears that I run out of system resources to open up new
windows,etc.

I have done searches, and see that this problem supposedly can't
happen in
Windows
XP because of how it manages the resource pool. I will describe what
is
happening on my machine.

I have a Dell 8250, 2.4Ghz, 80GB HD, 512MB RAM
On the Windows drive (C) I have over 3 GB free space. My virtual
memory
setting is set to allow windows to manage it, and the pagefile is
about
800mb.

I do a LOT of window opening and closing during the day. Opening and
closing 100's of chart windows in IE. At max, I have about 20
windows
open, about 12 in IE. I have an Ameritrade ticker running, giving me
streaming stock quotes. I also tend to have AOL 8.0 open, and
sometimes
Quicken. While this is a lot of activity, I am NOT running anything
requiring very heavy resources like photo editing software for
example.

Eventually whether its in AOL or IE, or anywhere in windows, I get to
the
point where additional windows won't open. When it happens inside
AOL, I
get a message, "The operation cannot be completed due to low memory or
hard
drive space. Please close one or more windows and try again". If I
then
close a window or two, I can proceed for a while, eventually having to
close
more windows. In IE, I'll click on a link to open in new window, and
the
window just refuses to open, unless I close other windows first. In
control
panel, clicking on System refuses to bring up that window. Yesterday
I
opened Quicken and resources were so low that all the Quicken icons
weren't
even able to display.

When I bring up Windows task manager, it shows physical memory 523K,
available 121K, System cache 236K. Kernel memory, total 45K, 33K
paged,
12K nonpaged.

So you see, these symptoms look to me exactly like the Windows 9x
world of
insufficient system resources, a problem which supposedly can't happen
in
XP.

Can anyone explain what is happening here that is keeping me from
opening
new windows?

 

[Plato]

The person below originally posted this question. I too am having the
same issue on my XP machine, where I have several APPS open and a
bunch of explorer windows, and at some point I try to open another
explorer or IE and it wont load or it will load but be blank, until I
close something else (with only 350mb out of 1024 mb used on physical
side!)

I also tried killing every process in taskmanager that I could but
this didnt fix the issue.

Did you set a max on your swap file? Or do you have it set to grow if
needed?

 

[Alex Nichol]

The person below originally posted this question. I too am having the
same issue on my XP machine, where I have several APPS open and a
bunch of explorer windows, and at some point I try to open another
explorer or IE and it wont load or it will load but be blank, until I
close something else (with only 350mb out of 1024 mb used on physical
side!)

I also tried killing every process in taskmanager that I could but
this didnt fix the issue.

This is not anything like the ME 'resource' trouble, which related to
very restrictive 16 bit data heaps that just do not exist in XP

It is *exactly* what to expect if you turn off page file, as I think you
were advocating in another thread. Physical memory is being used up as
somewhere to assign VM pages that have been allocated for programs and
never brought into use.