Application windows take up all available RAM

[Guest]

Greetings,

I have a perplexing issue: We're running Citrix MetaFrame XP on WTS2K, 2.1GB
dual processor, 2GB RAM. A change was made recently to the network
configuration: the NIC configuration was deleted and then reconfigured.
Within the last several days we've been experiencing "out of memory"
situations where RAM is peaking at 90% - 1.9GB. People are unable to log onto
Citrix and those already logged on cannot open their apps.

Here is what I've discovered so far:

- User logs into Citrix desktop and launches an application. I'll use
Outlook as a prime example.
- Looking at the Task Manager, the Outlook process takes up anywhere between
20-30MB of RAM.
- By minimizing the Outlook window, the Outlook process immediately drops
down to 1-3MB.
- Restoring the Outlook window only increases RAM utilization another couple
hundred KB.

I ran this same scenario with several other apps including IE, Adobe
Acrobat, Star Office, and MS Word and came up with the same results. The
initial window takes up 20-30MB of RAM until the window is minimized. If it
isn't, the RAM usage remains at that level. I have about 25-30 users on the
system throughout the day and with all of them opening apps takes up all
available RAM.

Can someone please help me with this?

Thanks in advance. - Patrick

 

[Guest]

Additional observations:

This a.m. when checking the process memory allocation for the Citrix server
it appears the amount or RAM each process is using is increasing. For
example: yesterday an Outlook process took up 20-30MB of RAM, today it's now
taking up 30-40MB! Nothing has changed. I'm thinking about increasing the RAM
to 4GB but if each process increases RAM usage I'm afraid it may not help.
Currently I only have 20 users logged on. Surely this isn't typical Windows
behavior?

PLEASE HELP!!

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

"Out of memory" situations doesn't necessassarily mean you're out of RAM.
It may be that you're exhausting some system (kernel) memory pool that is
not large enough, either because of an architectural limit or because of
unnusual demands on a specific pool.

It is normal for the memory usage to reduce significantly when windows are
minimized; I've seen that with several applications in perfectly normal
situations.

See if these KB articles are helpful:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=304101
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=247904

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=811308
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=272568

We've found the following settings helpful, but our servers have 6 GB of
RAM. The MSMQ parameter setting is only useful if you have applications
running on the Terminal Server that are actually using MSMQ.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory
Management]
"PagedPoolSize"=dword:ffffffff
"PoolUsageMaximum"=dword:A

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\msmq\parameters]
"KernelMemThreshold"=dword:5F

When you say RAM is peaking at 90%, what Performance Monitor counter are you
refering to?

If you can add more RAM, that will probably help. Not only will this reduce
RAM contention and thus reduce paging activity (if there is any) but also
allow the OS to allocate more RAM to some kernel memory pools, some of which
can not be paged. The size of some of these pools is fixed at OS boot time
and can not be changed while the OS is running. Windows 2003 Server is
better at managing these pools and memory in general, so if upgrading to
Windows 2003 is an option, you might want to investigate it. Be aware
however, the you will have to also upgrade the TS Licensing Service and
(probably) purchase Windows 2003 Terminal Services CALs, so you need to
factor that into you decision.

You may find the information in section 2.8 Monitoring RAM and Virtual
Memory usage at
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/WindowsGeneralWeb/RAMVirtualMemoryPageFileEtc.htm
useful.

--
Bruce Sanderson MVP Printing
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders

It is perfectly useless to know the right answer to the wrong question.