How to identify runaway process / memory leak

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Guest

I have an SBS2000 server that pretty much hangs after about 10 days of
running because it runs out of nonpaged pool space. It has been running fine
for about 5 years, and this started perhaps two months back. The first time,
I thought it was just an anomaly, but there has turned out to be a consistent
memory leak. Through PerfMon, I have identified the fact that both the
nonpaged bytes & the handle count steadily rise after a reboot but cannot
easily identify which process is responsible.

All the documentation I have seen seems to require me to have a suspect
process before I can determine whether it is, indeed, the problem. However,
how can I identify the runaway process if I have no idea which one is at
fault?
 
Brian said:
I have an SBS2000 server that pretty much hangs after about 10 days of
running because it runs out of nonpaged pool space. It has been running
fine
for about 5 years, and this started perhaps two months back. The first
time,
I thought it was just an anomaly, but there has turned out to be a
consistent
memory leak. Through PerfMon, I have identified the fact that both the
nonpaged bytes & the handle count steadily rise after a reboot but cannot
easily identify which process is responsible.

All the documentation I have seen seems to require me to have a suspect
process before I can determine whether it is, indeed, the problem.
However,
how can I identify the runaway process if I have no idea which one is at
fault?
Click to expand...

Watch the Task Manager. It will tell you which process consumes
ever increasing amounts of memory.
 
It creeps up so slowly (over days, not minutes) that it is difficult to get a
visual baseline on that. Is there any simple way to capture/export the task
manager data to a flat/delimited file so that I can compare side-by-side
after an 8-hour or 36-hour period?
 
In Perfmon you can monitor the Non Paged Pool on the Processes
themselves. Select the processes that you want to monitor and then set
a log on them. Select to to log to a csv file and you will be able to
view the results in a spreadsheet, at a glance you will be able to see
which process is increasingly using the Non Paged Pool. The log
interval is set a 1 second by default, you should change that so that it
creates more manageable log files, the log could be set to log the
values every 5 minutes or so.

John
 
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