Author: William Penn
Date: 04:08:12 10/12/02
I've been studying this for awhile, and I'm now fairly sure that Fritz7 has a memory drain with W98se. If I monitor the free physical RAM with the W98 System Monitor while Fritz7 is running in infinite calculation mode with 128MB hash table on a 500MHz Celeron processor, 256MB RAM system, it gradually ticks down towards zero. Eventually it arrives at zero and then the computer becomes very sluggish and perhaps crashes. The rate of memory drain is about 2MB per minute. So it depends on how much free physical memory you have to start. If you have a lot, and you don't run Fritz7 for very long, it might not tick down to zero. But for those who run Fritz7 for long periods, it may become a serious problem. I think I've found a temporary solution. Of course the Fritz7 programmers need to fix this serious bug, but in the meantime... I'm testing a special little utility which boosts the free physical RAM by a preset amount every x minutes. It is somewhat arbitrary what settings to use, but I'm boosting to a minimum of 32MB RAM every 4 minutes. That means the free memory ticks down to about 24MB, then gets boosted back to 32MB, then ticks down to about 24MB, then gets boosted back to 32MB, ad infinitum in 4 minute cycles. There are several such utilities available, and I've only tried this one, which seems OK for this simple task. It's very simple and easy to understand & use. It's called "CyberLat RAM Cleaner" which can be downloaded at: http://www.cyberlatino.com.mx/ Yes, much of that website is in Spanish because the author lives in Mexico, but this software utility is written in English. The other consideration with W95/W98/W98se/WinMe is of course system resources, which are quite limited with those op systems. (WinNT/2000/XP don't have that problem.) But Fritz7 is not too greedy in that regard, and that's not the problem here. The problem is definitely a memory drain. Some might call it a memory leak. WP
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