Promise RAID message agent memory leak

[news.lightship.net]

I am using the A7V8X with the onboard Promise FastTrak 376 RAID SATA
controller. I have been using the Promise monitoring utility that installs
the "Promise RAID message agent" service, but this has a serious memory leak
on Windows 2000.

I installed the Version 3.2.1 Build 8 that shipped on the CD and have also
downloaded Build 11 from ASUS's site, but both are leaking and causing my
system with 1GB of RAM to run out of memory in a couple of days.

I have verified the leak to be the "Promise RAID message agent" via a lot of
monitoring with Perfmon. When I don't start the service, handles and
non-paged pool bytes stay level, but when I start the service the non-paged
pool bytes and handle ramp up until I run out of memory.

I know it is not nessessary to run the service to have RAID, but I still
would like to have it available to monitor the drives. Is there any fix?

 

[Tim]

Is there a supported way to stop the process?
What happens if you end task it?
Might you run the process only when it is needed and shutdown when finished?

Have you posted a message to Promise about this - they should be able to fix
quickly (although it can be difficult).

- Tim

 

[news.lightship.net]

I can shut down the service, but that defeats the purpose of having the
service running. The messenger service is supposed to monitor the array and
tell me when an error occurs, but if it is off then I won't know about the
error until I reboot the server.

I also don't want to schedule the server to reboot during the nights because
what if there is a problem and the warning message hangs the server up
waiting for a response.

 

[Tim]

Hmmm - as I thought.
The probability of a failure day by day is low.
The key thing to see would be if one of the discs fails (I hope it is raid 1
not 0).
So, if you ran this once a day to check that both discs are ok you will be
able to get by.

In the mean time I would put the hurry up on Promise who are no doubt
already working on the problem since you will be one of a huge number of
people affected.

If the monitor program is a user application then stop and restarting it
should free all resources - unless of course it is provoking a leak in an
underlying driver.

So, I would get onto Promise pronto and have documented evidence at hand.

- Tim