Author: William Penn
Date: 07:25:31 10/10/02
(HP 6545C, OEM W98se/IE6, Celeron 500MHz, 255MB RAM, 80G Maxtor hd, Ultra ATA/133 PCI adapter card) Very recently (within the last month or so) there's a problem with the icons on my taskbar. They start turning black, usually 1-2 at a time, then eventually all of them. This problem usually isn't fatal. When I see the icons starting to turn black, if I close some other applications that restores things to normal. However if I let it go for very long, my computer may freeze up. I've applied the iconcache fix at http://www.aumha.org/regfiles.htm but that didn't help. I have operated this computer without any such problems for several years. Usually there's no error message when the icons start turning black, but I have now received one from MS Works while trying to printout something - Out of Memory. If I then close some open applications and click on the taskbar icons, they change back to normal colors and the printout can then be run. If I look at system resources via MSINFO32 they're fairly low, less than 20%. Most strongly implicated is a chess software application (Fritz 7) that allocates RAM for hash tables, and I only see the black icons if this application is running. I usually allocate 128MB for hash tables, leaving 127MB available for the op system and other applications. That's usually OK, but after an hour or more the taskbar icons may start turning black. If I increase the RAM allocated to hash tables to 190MB, leaving only about 65MB for the op system and other applications, then the black icons appear much quicker. So this software application is definitely involved, and possibly this problem came along with the September 2002 service pack for Fritz 7 -- because I didn't see it previously. Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem with the September 2002 Fritz 7 service pack update? I've got plenty of free hard drive space, over 50G free on an 80G hard drive. So I think that means windows memory management is not working properly, otherwise there could not be an Out of Memory situation. Correct? Also, I just found this definition of a "memory leak" which sounds like a possible culprit: http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/m/memory_leak.html memory leak n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called core leak. These problems were severe on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got a real leak!). See aliasing bug, fandango on core, smash the stack, precedence lossage, overrun screw, leaky heap, leak. So, is it a memory leak? What to do? WP
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.