Teach me about Memory Leaks

[JohnWaynesTeeth]

I am an engineer and I do alot of work with programming, systems, web servers, etc. at work, but most of my knowledge is from experience and therefore limited to what I've had to troubeshoot.

At home I am running Win95 (hey it still works) on a 1 GHz Athlon with 256 megs of ddr ram. I leave the computer on constantly and I only really run 4 programs: AOL, N-track, Fruity Demo, and Sammy Sosa's High Heat Baseball (I'm addicted).

When I start the machine and check the system monitor I am usually at about 20-40 megs used RAM (I'm going by memory here so don't quote me). After running a couple programs and shutting them down my used RAM is up at 244 megs. For some reason it doesn't want to relese the memory after I shut everything down. It doesn't seem to be dependent on any specific program (i.e. I notice this even if I haven't used n-track since re-booting).

So, does this seems to be symptomatic of a memory leak somewhere? Is this usually associated with a program, the OS, etc. And what types of things can I do to troubleshoot and remedy it, or am I stuck constantly rebooting to free up all my memory?

Any IT guys out there that can give me some knowledge?

Thanks,
Pete

 

[elevate]

You've pretty much defined memory leak in your post. It's when a program, or the OS, doesn't reclaim memory after it's being used. Sometimes this is a cyclical process while the app is running, where the app just keeps eating more and more memory as long as it's open, a la Dreamweaver 3 a couple years ago.

I believe there are apps that can reclaim unused memory. Or, if you can run VB Scripts on your computer, you can put this in a text file:

Mystring = Space(80000000)

and give it a .vbs extension. This will free up your leaked memory. You'll need the Visual Basic Runtime files to run this, which you should be able to find somewhere, perhaps on your Windows cd.

 

[barefoot]

Is this a concern with newer operating systems? Seems as if a true multitasking OS shouldn't have this issue. And it's my understanding that Win95 just sort of fakes multitasking. No?

barefoot

 

[elevate]

It isn't a problem with any NT OS, or at least I haven't had a problem with memory leaks with the operating system. I used to use that script while using Dreamweaver, which seemed to help. If I didn't use it, I would eventually get an out of memory error message. The alternative would have been to close and reopen Dreamweaver every 30 minutes or so.

 

[kevellus]

A couple things I would try as a sanity check:

- when you're experiencing the 'leak' check your task manager processes to see what's eating up all all your memory, that'll at least help point to what the culprit is, something should be taking up an abnormal amount of space.

- Also I see that you're runnin AOL and am online, I'm not going to assume anything and ask if you've run a virus check. I've seen them eat up a ton of memory before.

One question....did this just recently happen, or has it always been running this way?