WIN2K Servers Eating Memory?

Anyone seen this occur?

2 Servers Diffrent Domains with nothing in common.
Diffrent APPs, One has Veritas, one does not.

Both have Exchange

One has 5 clients
One has 20

The one with 20 has a gig of ram
The one with 5 has 512

Both servers have all current updates.

Im not sure but this problem may have started after the latest service packs.

After about 3 days both servers will be down to 5% to 7% avaible memory left.

Reboot and everything is cool again.

Any ideas where to start looking?

 

Whoof. I know what to start looking for but the where is gonna be a little tougher.

You almost certainly have an app with a "memory leak" - a bug in the way a program is written that causes it to take small chunks of RAM for temporary use (normal) but then not release them when finished but also not notice it has them locked. So next time, it takes another small chunk, and another and another until you ain't got any left. Rebooting releases all the memory but the process starts right back up.

You can start to track it down by using performance monitor.

Pick a few processes (like DNS) and log Page file bytes and Working set bytes for a few days. If the numbers keep on growing over time, you've found the process that's causing the problem. That will hopefully lead you to the program (or piece of the OS) that is doing the deed. For the behavior you are seeing, it probably something that is always running since an app that is shut down will normally release all memory it held. Normally.

And there is at least one virus that exploits a memory leak via a spooler process so I'd make that one of the first I looked at. I used DNS as an example above since the original 2K server release had that exact problem. Should have been fixed by SP1 though.

Another thing that might give you a starting place is to reboot, open task manager and go to processes and sort by memory then note which have any significant amounts. Do the same thing after a day and after two days and the baddie may have climbed up to the top.

 

Cool,
Thanks, Newt.

 

Memory

The big culprit was STORE.exe

After reading this article time will tell if it's actually a problem or not.

I'm going to let them run for a few days and see what happens.