Memory leak maybe?

[mitreklov]

Hello forum,

 

We have a 3 month long 24hr/7day week installation running in London right now.

 

Now that system has been running continuously for a few weeks we have been observing memory full message from Windows (8.1) which causes Watchout to stop responding.

Windows claims there is insufficient memory. Of the 16Gb of system RAM installed on the display machines, Watchout appears to, over time, use increasing amounts of RAM until Windows complains it has run out. Quit Watchpoint and the RAM is freed up, relaunch Watchpoint display software and you are back running again until the next time it fills the RAM.

I'm trying to establish from our engineer how long it takes for the RAM to fill up, we have 9 display machine and it looks like they will all display behaviour at some point.

 

I suppose the leak could be caused by a Windows subsystem, driver other background process but as the RAM is cleared when Watchout is quit rather points the finger at Watchout.

 

Some environment details:

 

Watchout 6.0 (we have not had the opportunity to update to 6.01 yet)

Windows 8.1

Apple Mac Mini display machines i7 3ghz, 16gb ram 128gb System Drive, 1tb SSD content 

The project is built around a 24hr looping timeline locked to time of day time code.

 

A lot of the content is HAP Alpha encoded

 

Has any one seen anything like before on long term installs with Watchout 6?

Could this be a Watchout memory leak?

 

Any input would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

 

Tim 

[Erik Rönnqvist]

Are you sure Watchout is allocating all that memory? Watchout is still a 32-bit application, and as such it cannot allocate more then 4 GB of memory before it runs out of address space, which is quite far from the 16 GB installed in the machine. 

 

/Erik 

[mitreklov]

Erik,

 

Good point, I'm only going by the fact that when you quit Watchout you get all the memory back. Having said that I'm only repeating what I'm being told by the onsite engineer. We have set up a test rig with the same content here in the workshop so we can monitor what is going on in more detail, once I know more I'll report back.

 

Thanks for the quick response by the way.

 

Tim

[jfk]

While it is certainly not impossible for watchout to have a memory leak,

it is just as likely the leak is in a driver that is indirectly called by WATCHOUT (via standard Windows API calls).

Take a close look at all your drivers for compatibility with Windows 8.1 

would not be the first time motherboard drivers

(USB, disc controller, disc drive, etc) showed issues like this.

So when checking be sure all motherboard related drivers show Apple as their source.

I have used Apple bootcamp windows drivers with Windows 7 Professional with no issues,

but no experience with Windows 8.1 and bootcamp.

(Yes, I know current Macs will not allow win 7 with bootcamp, my Mac is a bit older ;-)

[Mike Fahl]

I would concur with both Erik and Jim. Since WATCHOUT is a 32 bit app, it can not use more than 4GB by itself. It could still have a leak, of course, and run out of space inside its 4GB "world". But that would not cause Windows to run out of memory on a 16 GB system. So my guess is there's something else in the system that's being used by WATCHOUT - such as a driver or similar -  that in its turn has a leak causing the OS to run out of memory. More information is probably needed to figure this out.