Low OS Paged Pool Memory

J

JBaker4981

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 22, 2007
Messages
90
I keep getting error messages in several applications that my OS is out of or low on paged pool memory. Computer specs are current in sig. The Applications that give me this error is Team Fortress 2, Portal, Half Life 2 Ep 2, FireFox 2, and Photoshop CS3. I have read about increasing my page file or something from 256MB to 384 (did this months ago and forgot exactly what it was, sorry.) But... it did not work. Obviously.

Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem and/or a fix? Thanks guys
 
If your page file is so tiny, then that could well be the source of the problem. Why not have a couple of gigabytes of page file?
 
Mithent said:
If your page file is so tiny, then that could well be the source of the problem. Why not have a couple of gigabytes of page file?
Click to expand...


Page file has nothing to do with the paged pool. The paged pool and non-paged pool memory regions have very specific and limited sizes. They are used by application stacks, driver stacks, file handles, and such. (Yes, for the truly hard core this is a way oversimplified description.)

To figure out what is happening to your paged pool over time and identify the process that is causing the pool to deplete (assuming you are running XP/2003 or later), set up a counter log in perfmon. Capture the process object counters every five minutes or so over several days (depending on how slow the leak is, several days to several weeks of run time may be needed before the pool depletes). You'd be amazed how many drivers leak non-paged pool memory, but slowly enough it would take 10-11 months to deplete the pool to where your machine would crash.

The guys writing the drivers assume you will be rebooting at least every few months or so for security patches, so you'll never have issues due to their poor drivers because your servers just won't be running long enough. (EMC SAN drivers come to mind. At least the latest revisions would take about 11 months to crash Windows servers. The previous revisions would take machines out in about 6 months. Sloppy stuff.)

After capturing the data, display the graph for all of the processes, delete all the ones that don't match the color of the line that is climbing continuously, then delete the remaining items that are are displaying the same color one at a time(its a bit of a pain theat perfmon keeps using the same 8 colors over and over again for different processes), until the upward sloping line is removed. The process that when removed, removes the line is the culprit. Track which app uses that executable, get the latest patch from the vendor, and hoped they've fixed it

An alternative would be to do a search on the MS web site for poolmon, and use that to track paged pool usage by process.

If you need to do this on Windows 2000, you have to set some registry entries and reboot first to expose the pool counters so they can be tracked by process handle rather than just having the total resultant size of the pool available.
 
Ah, fair enough, got my definitions off there. I do usually check if I'm not sure, but what with the very small page file and problems with large programs it did sound like a likely scenario.
 
Fixed!

Earlier, I tried running CSS and it gave me the same error, however it gave me a little more info. It said it could not find "I9 Direct3D driver". I checked my Ati drivers and realized I never updated them since I installed windows. Downloaded ATI CCC 8.5 and everything works now. I am officially a dumbass.
 
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