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View Full Version : Memory Leak, troubleshooting



jorgen
03-31-2010, 08:24 AM
In the last two weeks, one particular server has had a memory leak three times.
Message was "The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the pool was empty."
Looking for a tool to troubleshoot this.
Tried poolmon and pooltag. Poolmon is useless because you have to manually copy the data and log it in notepad yourself. Have not figured out how to log with pooltag. The problem is this is happening late at night, off hours.

Anyone done anything like this?
I could manually watch task manager for virtual memory, but again, hit or miss, late at night. No thanks.
I am using a perfmon, but that is not going to tell me which process is leaking.

Allshow97
03-31-2010, 09:48 AM
This might be a dumb question, but have you checked the Application logs to see if the application in question crashed and restarted? Is it locking up the server completely? Can you not look at task manage around the crash times to see which processes memory usage is skyrocketing? Do you perform network backups to this server? I've had issues with Legato network backup agent and BackupExec agents causing memory leaks in the past. Just a couple things you could look at. Just my 2cents.

eg mike
03-31-2010, 01:00 PM
You may want to add what the specs are... Hardware, Operating System?

jorgen
03-31-2010, 01:30 PM
Have checked logs, not that lucky. Can't really look at task manager while its crashing, cause I don't know when its going to happen, and I have more of a life than waiting around at midnight for a server to act up.
Do perform backups, Symantec Backup Exec 10D, but that has been running for a long time and I haven't ever really had a problem with it.... wait, scratch that. I've had all kinds of problems with it, I hate backup exec, but all the problems I have had so far have been with various backups breaking and there useless log files.
Also running AVG business security with the admin console and the SQL database.
Today I noticed there are 5 instances of SQL. One of which was almost 500MB (in memory), I stopped it a few hours ago, and its so far grown to 220. I think it was the SBSMonitor.

Small business Server 2003
Pentium D, looks like a Dual core 3G processor
2 Gig ram
Mostly a file server.
Some dumbass gave Disk0 a 16G OS partition (C: ) and a 280 Gig partition (D: ) on a RAID5 (Will strangle)

Average page file is 1.5G, not convinced this is a problem due to lack of memory, and that's usually my favorite thing to blame it on.

jorgen
03-31-2010, 02:01 PM
To be clear, I am looking for a tool that will log memory usage and identify what is using it.
I have tools for viewing, but haven't found anything that will log usage yet.

91LudeSiT
03-31-2010, 08:50 PM
This is quite simply due to not enough virtual memory, if you check around MS recommends using a virtual memory minimum of 1.5 times the ram. Which SQL are you running? If its oracle you have no where near enough ram.

jorgen
04-01-2010, 01:20 PM
Microsoft SQL 2005, probably lite.
Its mostly for applications that depend on it. AVG, Symantec, Small business monitor, ect.