Windows Handle Count

  • Thread starter Thread starter Adam Laforge
  • Start date Start date
A

Adam Laforge

Hey all,

So, the problem tends to come up while I'm browsing the web with about 20
tabs open in IE (I have my reasons) and suddenly the next tab I try to open
won't come up. If I go to right click somewhere, the context menu won't
come up. If I close a tab, I can get the task manager to open. On the
Performance tab I'll find around 24,000 handles open. If I close a few
windows this goes down, and I can again do some stuff again but only until I
hit this magical ~24k limit. Has anyone else been seeing this? I've seen
this in XP previously, but it seems to happen a lot more often in Vista (I
suspect because I'm closer to the limit at boot). For the record this is
RC1 x86. Is there a hard handle count limit of some kind? I understand
that the more handles you have floating around the slower the system will
become, but this seems like a consistant restriction on how much can be
running.

-Adam Laforge
 
Hi Adam,

Hmm, just opened 40 tabs, handles rose from ~16,000 to 18,500, no
performance issues. This is with build 5744 x64. I don't have a 32-bit
install running right now to compare it against. It may possibly be a I/O
resource limitation.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
 
Very strange. I just opened a good 30 tabs myself (shortly after a reboot),
and only saw the handle count increase a couple thousand. It seems like
something gets out of hand somewhere. I'll need to review this further next
time it happens. I usually last about 5 days before things just start to
pile up. I've also previously noticed a svchost which (according to Proc
Explorer) contains,

DHCP Client
Security Center
TCP/IP
Windows Audio
Windows Event Viewer

Shoot up to over 8000 handles on it's own. I'm basically willing to blame
Creative Labs drivers for this one (for now) as they're rather shotty as is,
but this certainly doesn't help my handle issues. I'm sorta curious if x64
will handle this stuff better, but I'm running x86 due to the driver
problems related to x64 at this point. What I just don't understand is why
there seems to be this hard limit in place where Windows suddenly won't give
out any more handles. It also becomes rather hard to diagnose when the
system runs out of handles and won't let you do anything to look into the
problem until you no longer have the problem (because you closed some
stuff).

-Adam Laforge
 
Hi Adam,

I've been seeing this problem on XP for a number of years on a number of
different machines, only in my case the threshold seems to be around 20,000
handles. Sometimes I can go above, at other times problems will start
occuring slightly below that (18,000).

Menu bars won't come up, simple apps like even Notepad won't launch, dialog
boxes (like Save As) won't appear, etc, until I start shutting down a few
apps and release handles. As soon as the handle count drops below a certain
point, things start returning to normal, until I hit that number again.
Sounds to me like the same symptoms. From my observations, amount of RAM
seems to be irrelevant.

I've switched over to XP x64 on one of my machines almost a year ago now,
and haven't run into that issue since. But I'm still seeing that problem on
my office machines (all running XP x86). I've never run across a "real"
solution for the x86 version. As a result, I can't keep an XP x86 machine
up for more than a week.

I'd love to see a KB article to at least acknowledge the problem.
 
I'm not exactly sure what it is about Vista x86. I've seen it a few times
in XP x86, but very rarely. In Vista, it seems something comes along after
around 5 days and starts eating handles on me and then when I go to open a
bunch of tabs in IE, suddenly it happens. I'm sitting with the task manager
open on another monitor right now and it's very weird to watch the handle
count. It goes up and down by thousands for no apparent reason. Of course,
all the background stuff going on could explain that. I wonder if the
handle limit is 32768. Seems to happen at just about the right number to be
limited by a 16-bit limit of some sort. Am I still running Win 3.1 here?
;P

-Adam
 
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