Windows 7 Memory Leak?

Hello mmarcu :)

While I don't doubt your observations, I am confident that "memory leaks" cannot be caused by fragmentation. In theory, fragmentation could expose a bug which manifests itself as a leak, but in such a scenario the act of defragmenting would merely mask the underlying bug.

At this point, Win7 code is not known to suffer from any leaks of the magnitude which you're describing. (Otherwise, most or all of our machines would be behaving the same way.) Hence, if there is actually a leak on your machine, logically it is caused by something environmental - software or a specific combination of settings that are particular to your computer and very few others.

Given the symptoms you've described, if I was forced to guess I'd say the anti-virus filter driver would be the most likely culprit.

H2SO4 said:

Hello mmarcu :)

While I don't doubt your observations, I am confident that "memory leaks" cannot be caused by fragmentation. In theory, fragmentation could expose a bug which manifests itself as a leak, but in such a scenario the act of defragmenting would merely mask the underlying bug.

At this point, Win7 code is not known to suffer from any leaks of the magnitude which you're describing. (Otherwise, most or all of our machines would be behaving the same way.) Hence, if there is actually a leak on your machine, logically it is caused by something environmental - software or a specific combination of settings that are particular to your computer and very few others.

Given the symptoms you've described, if I was forced to guess I'd say the anti-virus filter driver would be the most likely culprit.

Hi H2SO4 ,

First I am using "AVIRA" Freeware version and I do not see how it is involved the mem. used by "avgnt.exe" and by "avguard.exe" are stable ~ 12Mb. ( on XP PRO ~14Mb.) .

I`m not sure "memory leak" is the right term on our subject . The point is that I had a problem and it looks it was resolved by defraging c: I do not understand how and I agree with You " "memory leaks" cannot be caused by fragmentation" , it didn`t came back for about 7 days after being constant more then 16 days until defrag. Kernel paged mem. was higher than 1.2 g. now it is ~ 133 - 200 Mb.

Appreciate Your`s comments .

I have the similar problem. I'm running Windows 7 Prof 64bit RTM. After having the computer running for 8+ hrs, I get a Windows message that says "Your computer is low on memory. Save your files and close the programs: Microsoft Office Outlook, Internet Explorer"

I have 4 GB of memory. When I check the Windows Task Manager Performance, I have over 1GB of memory free but I still get this warning message. I also noticed that the Internet Explorer is consuming lot of memory. I saw couple of instances of IE running consuming over 100 MB of memory each. Has anyone run into these problems and if so, any recommendation on fixing this issue? I also have a problem shutting the system down. It take over 4 minutes to shutdown. Very frustrating...

@jml, Do you have a pagefile?

Yes, my pagefile is system managed.