Resource Leaks, Redux
Hi Fred, Big fan of plus newsletter. Use it and recommend it. A quick question: Currently run a very stable WIN98SE system that has 1 problem-over a period of time, system resources seem to slowly leak out and disappear. I use resource meter to monitor current status but it doesn't show what applications are using the resources. My question: do you know of a program that shows what programs are actually using what resources? Thanks. ---Mark Shapiro
"Resource Leaks" are a well-known problem in Win3/9x/Me, Mark; and the cause goes all the way back to the earliest days of that line of OSes. It's a fundamental architectural limit of the software, no matter how fast or capacious a PC itself is. You could put infinite RAM in a Win98 PC, and you'd still have Resource limits. (See: "Why Are There System Resource Limits, Anyway?" http://langa.com/newsletters/2000/2000-06-12.htm#3 ) BTW: Win2K and XP largely remove that constraint, and instead work to the limits of the hardware.
In the older versions of Windows, a program may allocate System Resources to itself but then fail to give them back later for some reason (usually a programming error). As more and more Resources get eaten up this way, the total pool of available Resources seems to shrink over time, as if there were a leak!
Eventually, you may reach a point when you try to run something that needs more Resources than are available, and the OS trips over itself. Crash!
Because the leaks are hidden from the OS, there's no tool you can run inside the OS that will tell you what's leaking--- that's the whole problem. But you still can do a little sleuthing to track down and solve most leaks. In fact, we ran a whole series of articles on the topic:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17200581
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17200583
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17200586
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17200587
And:
http://langa.com/u/8k.htm
I think you'll find the answer to just about any Resource-related issue in there, Mark.
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