Watching for leaks in Jing for Windows
Hiya,
Are you the type who likes to keep an eye on your applications?
Do you crack open Task Manager and check the 'Mem Usage' to see who's the biggest hog on your system?
If you are and you see Jing behaving badly, please let us know.
However, I do have a suggestion.
I'd recommend you not look at the 'Mem Usage', but rather the 'VM Size'. The 'Mem Usage' is the amount of RAM that Jing is using at that time and it varies depending on things like the total amount of RAM available and the amount of RAM other applications are using.
The Virtual Memory Size ('VM Size' on XP's Task Manager, 'Commit Size' on Vista's Task Manager) shows the Jing ONLY memory...at least to a best approximation. From what I can find, these numbers all seem to come with a bevy of 'sort ofs' and 'mostlies'.
If this number is growing consistently and never leveling off or decreasing, it's a sign that we may have some 'poor memory management'.
So, if you've got a minute:
- Here's how to see Virtual Size on Task Manager on XP
- Here's how to see Virtual Size on Task Manager on Vista
If you notice the virtual memory growing a lot or if your other apps or Jing seems to run slow, please let us know.
have a good day,
bill 'My current Jing Virtual Memory Size' scanlon
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My The Virtual Memory Size is running at 98,688k on windows vista. and all my other stuff in about 40,000k so ye.
@Paul
Absolutely it's our responsibility to watch the memory usage. I'm just letting people know how best to keep us honest.
Really the point here is to let people (who are already letting us know about their memory usage) know that they should be looking for CONTINUOUS GROWTH in the Virtual Memory.
@ badchris
Jing will always 'be big' cause it's a .NET app (see this blog post)
The thing to look for is does it keep growing as you go. Does it never go back down or level off?
@Bill Scanlon
no it stay's about that high that's when its just open when doing a record its a bit higher.
As a .NET developer myself, I appreciate the issues, but I have to say you guys seem to be having an extraordinarily difficult time with this memory issue.
I just found Jing tonight (having ignored it on prior visits to the TS site cuz I simply didn't understand it). But 5 hours ago I had no idea what it was and of course didn't have it loaded. In the last 5 hours I've created a blog that explains my entire experience, from knowing nothing through jingin' every aspect of the blog itself. (I'll clean it up then post it somewhere or give it you this site.) I also noticed that jingin a 2k static image instantly sucks an additional 30MB to 60MB out of available RAM (yes, Mem and VM). When completely idle Jing runs 119MB of VM. When it's started, before use, it uses 40-50MB. Ouch. And there are over half a million page faults - more than any application that's been running for the last 20 hours, including vmWare, Visual Studio, Outlook, IE7, and any other gas guzzler you can imagine.
I'm sorry guys but you can't give full credit to Microsoft for this, can't blame GC, can't just encourage users to watch memory and shutdown before their system dies. You need to call in some resources and nip this before it becomes the publicity issue that have plagued other fine (no sarcasm) TS products.
Ideas:
1) Use the dispose pattern and properly dispose everything.
2) Manually call GC whether you need to or not.
3) Try to use different processes for unrelated functions. Use remoting between them, or heck, use the FileSystem object and have a service trigger activity and terminate processes as required. This will allow processes to be wrapped up and then re-initialized, and it should help you to isolate where the leaks are.
4) Are you using unmanaged components for anything that is not getting released by GC? Using PInvoke? Third-part comms or imaging components?Have you done profiling to see what lines of code are the offenders?
5) If the issue is in audio and/or video can you simply disable those features until someone wants them?
C',mon, in all of this time you have to have isolated the issue to a point where you can point to some really small block of offensive code, especially if you're invoking magic wands to jing these issues away. :)
Anyway, I look forward to future updates. I have a number of ideas for how to use this in my daily life. And like you I'm going to see what sort of business model can be wrapped around it.
And thanks for the innovative (and freeware) project model that you're using for this. I think it's a very good approach from many angles.
@TonyG.
Glad to hear you like it and sorry about the memory stuff.
We are trying to keep an eye out for whether we can decrease the large memory footprint, but we aren't devoting a lot of resource to it while we are just a project.
Not that we don't see the value in it. We know that Jing needs to be lean and mean as possible.
Thanks for the ideas too!