Having read all this about 10.31 etc I decided to install it yesterday. On startup it went to over 30Mb and reached about 36mb by late last night. This moring had gone down to 22.5mb, when I first looked at about 07:30, after the 3am minimise and has already crept up to about 22.8mb. This pattern is no different to what I have seen on other releases. It seems like the very first minimise at 3am reduces the memory used considerably but subsequent minimises seem to have little or no effect at all and I really dont expect this to be any different. It is almost as if there is some kind of flag in the program saying that once the memeory cleanup has been done once it never does it again. For me this release seems no different for memory utilisation at all so far.
Now none of what I have seen over the past few releases has been a huge problem memory wise and with my 512mb memory I guess I could run for a number of weeks (hopefully) with no memory problems, but it would be good if Brian could get the memory useage to stabilise over time. There are so many variations of configs etc that it is unlikely that any two people will see the same absolute memory useage. I believe that it should be possible to get WD to behave consistantly, I think we should be seeing WD memory useage peak at month end as the buffers and log files etc grow in size. It would not actually matter I believe if WD did this and then stayed fairly constant in memory use from then on, poeple would at least then be able to plan on what resources they needed. It is the constant slow & steady increase which is the issue.
got on my WDL site this AM, and last data was from 0300, about 4 hours ago. I had just installed the latest sw, after having had 10.30g run for 9 days straight.
So I was like, back to 10.30g here we go. But I found out that Windows Update had sucked down a ‘critical update’ that forced an ‘automaic reboot’… this happened on my laptop too that I usually leave on. What the hell is this? Auto reboot… ? What if I had important work that I had not closed… browser windows whose URL I had forgotten?
I have never ever heard of any app explicitly causing an auto reboot without OK of the operator.
Nice work Microsoft… this is about a bad a sin as any on their part.
You can configure it to only notify you of updates or do the update in background and then only reboot when you allow. You can also turn off auto updates.
More amazed at how wrong I was! In fact, I did have auto update/install turned on in my laptop and WD machine, and not a third, which is how I found out the problem.
Sorry folks.
What tools did you find? I’ve not developed any compiled C/C++ code for a few years and I was sure I used to have a memory/resource viewing tool that would let you drill down to see what resources were consuming memory. I can’t remember what I used to use though and can’t seem to find anything resembling it in web searches.
Just checked my memory after a second 3am minimise and this time WD has reduced its memory use for a second night running, not as low as the first night but still down to just over 26mb, so it would seem that there is some imporvement at this level. Still growing slowly overall though, but not enough to cause problems for quite a while I would guess.
Hey Brian…feature request time…why not collect WD memory usage data and then allow it to be plotted on a graph which we can upload to the web. We can then see at a glance who has a problem, and maybe get an idea (from what is displayed on the site) of which function might be causing the problem. This is partly serious suggestion
I have just checked my memory use again after another 3am minimise last night and this time it has not dropped significantly at all, it is now sitting at 34.8mb which means that the 3am minimise has had very little if any effect at all. I now expect to see it grow slowly over time. Obviously I do not have a problem like grhughes has but it is still growing.
I think you will also find that that the memory usage increases and the spike in CPU usage (and momentary ‘hang’) at the top of every minute are somehow related. It is at the top of every minute that the usage goes up. The CPU spike to 100% also cripples the PC momentarily.
If Brian can examine the processes that occur at the top of the minute and (wild suggestion here) - maybe break them up to occur at different times, then maybe whatever is going on won’t be nearly as drastic…
I suspect that the ‘on the minute’ processing is doing things like calculating new averages, so people would probably expect those values to be calculated on the minute rather than at 27 seconds past (or whatever new time was chosen).
I have been seeing the top of the minute 100% ever since I started using WD, it is only noticeable (for me) really since I moved to an 800Mhz PC but since it is dedicated to WD I dont really care. The point here is that just about any app will grab 100% of the cpu for as long as it can if it gets busy, the problem comes if it locks out any other app from grabbing a share of the cpu. Dont know if Windows has a ‘task must complete flag’ like the mainframes I worked on but doing something like that would be a problem which stopped it being preempted for any significant period. I bet if you run WD on the fastest uniprocessor you can find you wont notice the 100% cpu anyway. I guess I could have gone for a true multi-processor (twin cores or dual Xenons) if money was no object, then WD could have 1 cpu all the time, only problem there was the other app is written to use 2 cpu’s if they exist!
If WD is busy then its busy doing something which needs to be done, as Chris said I dont want my minute averages done at 27secs past each minute, or my 10 minute ones done at 11mins 45secs! You have to accept that WD is processing some almost real time data (well it is with a Davis system which updates every 2 or so seconds) so it cant miss a beat. If you run WD on a machine which you use for many other things then you will have to accept some trade off because of the nature of WD in my view. That is one of the reasons I went for a dedicated WD box, since I could not co-exist some other apps I needed to run on my fast PC with WD it was simply a no-go!
Constant memory growth however is a completely different issue and we do need to get the really bad problems with that tied down and fixed.
However, when the CPU usage gets to the point that it ends up crashing on the minute (occasionally) OR when you simply maximize WD after its been in the systray for a while, then that’s a problem. (and this is on a 2.4Ghz celeron cpu with 1.5Gb of ram.
There’s something in there that just isn’t as stable as it should be.
Larry
Larry you’re absolutely right there. If it crashes then its a bug which needs fixing… I was just commenting on the 100% cpu peaks when nothing else goes awry.
