Sidebar.exe memory leak?

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winston856

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 28, 2004
Messages
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So I've been watching my sidebar recently after seeing my ram useage over 65%. My sidebar's been using excessive memory and I don't know if it's normal or not.

I'm aware of how Vista "uses" your memory now instead of just letting it sit there like Xp did and all that.

Anyway, If I close the sidebar and reopen it with all my gadgets open, it's at about 23MB's of memory. Before I closed it the thing was consuming over 160MB's of memory.

Is this normal consumption?

processes.jpg


performance.jpg


I've got FF open with about 11 tabs in one window so that's okay, but I've had pretty much the same gadgets on previous installs, but maybe I just didn't notice the ram useage as much.
 
i know mine will do that when i get a corrupt sidebar thing. But when they are all working fine, and are 'clean', then its ok.
 
Just as a tip: if you're using Paint to make those pictures, Paint in Vista has a new feature - crop, on the Image menu. It would get rid of that extra white stuff. :)

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for some reason i have 2 instances of sidebar.exe running in my task manager, is that normal?
 
it's prolly not sidebar.exe but one of the tools you use. a lot of the sidebar tools tend to suck really bad.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Just as a tip: if you're using Paint to make those pictures, Paint in Vista has a new feature - crop, on the Image menu. It would get rid of that extra white stuff. :)

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Yeah thanks bbz, I usually use that tool but I just put these up real hasty.

Zardoz said:
it's prolly not sidebar.exe but one of the tools you use. a lot of the sidebar tools tend to suck really bad.
Click to expand...

Well the ONLY two new gadgets I have are a weather gadget and a recycle bin gadget.

Specifically "Imp's recycle bin" and this weather gadget that's suppose to resemble the stock one only better...


On a side note, is it just me or has jpeg compression always been that crappy? I don't remember it being that bad in Xp.


Oh and, Merry Christmas To you all :D
 
I only had a couple sidebar items running and it slowed my system to a crawl all the time. Eventually I turned that shit off and kept it off, so yeah, I think theres a real problem somewhere.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Just as a tip: if you're using Paint to make those pictures, Paint in Vista has a new feature - crop, on the Image menu. It would get rid of that extra white stuff. :)

</off_topic>
Click to expand...

Far easyer option is to press alt+printscreen to capture only the active window.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Just as a tip: if you're using Paint to make those pictures, Paint in Vista has a new feature - crop, on the Image menu. It would get rid of that extra white stuff. :)

</off_topic>
Click to expand...
or use alt+print screen! That autocrops it to the window you're taking a screenshot of.
 
Here's a pic I just snapped of it now.

tskmngr.jpg


This can't be right, I think I'm going to get rid of the two new gadgets then keep an eye on it.

Edit --- I just noticed that there are TWO sidebar.exe processes open, only one of them is really high. What's up with that?
 
I'm fairly sure that one of them is for all the MS default applications, and the second instance is for downloaded add-ons.
 
Sidebar is lame anyway, it was the very first thing I removed from Vista. They take up so much space on screen it's like going from 22 inch to 17. And if you cover the with other windows, well.. what are they there for? Eating resources, that's what.
 
Well I closed the new weather app I was using and kept the recycle bin and so far the biggest sidebar.exe is up to 43MB, much better than 285MB. So I think it was the weather gadget that was creating the memory leak.
 
FWIW, I use both Weatherbug and Accuweather in the sidebar. Don't ask why, I just use both!:eek:

Anyway, the sidebar processes use 23Mb and 36Mb each and remain steady.

So... if you want a weather gadget, you might want to try one of those.
 
Yeah I might have spoke too soon, my computer's been idling since I was at work and it's up to 68MB now, still much less but I'm going to see if it tops out.

I used to use weatherbug and it was a good little gadget, I should just get it again.
 
Personally, I'd point the finger at the recycle bin gadget. Having had a think about this problem, it seems to me that a natural place to keep extra recovery information would be the RAM.

Perhaps it's keeping some kind of bare bones image of the files you're deleting and presenting you with extra recovery information? In fact, as a further extrapolation, I'd suggest it does this to get around UAC prompts, by writing to the RAM instead of the HDD, it wouldn't have to get permission from the kernel in the same way and can write to a file on logoff (hence the low memory useage on boot).

Best way to test this, is to copy some largeish files, then delete them and see what happens to the memory useage on sidebar.exe.
 
Lucio said:
Personally, I'd point the finger at the recycle bin gadget. Having had a think about this problem, it seems to me that a natural place to keep extra recovery information would be the RAM.

Perhaps it's keeping some kind of bare bones image of the files you're deleting and presenting you with extra recovery information? In fact, as a further extrapolation, I'd suggest it does this to get around UAC prompts, by writing to the RAM instead of the HDD, it wouldn't have to get permission from the kernel in the same way and can write to a file on logoff (hence the low memory useage on boot).

Best way to test this, is to copy some largeish files, then delete them and see what happens to the memory useage on sidebar.exe.
Click to expand...

Interesting thought, I took the recycle bin off now since it was up to 145MB. Now all that 's on there is the quad core meter, app launcher and a gmail counter. I'm going to do this one by one if I have to :p

Kowan said:
I hold Shift when I right click to delete. :p
Click to expand...

Me too, but sometimes I like dragging them to the recycle bin if I'm unsure about deleting them.
 
" Analysis of my log files reveal that quite a few people are looking for an answer to why there are 2 sidebar.exe processes running on Windows Vista.

The reason is simple: there's one process for the docked Sidebar at the edge of the screen, and there's another process to handle gadgets floating around on your desktop.

As to why there are two processes when you have no floating gadgets on your desktop, your guess is as good as mine."

Found the above on a site when I googled "two sidebar.exe running"
Seems to be happening to alot of people.

This has also happened to me after another Windows Update.
I'm really getting tired of manually having to google each KB# to find out what it is that WinUpdate wants to install.
 
My sidebars are using 20,260KB and 8,588KB of RAM. I''m using the clock, calendar, weather gadget and recycle bin. The computer has been on for at least ten hours now so that's about as high as the RAM usage goes.
 
There is only 2 Sidebar.exe's running if you add your own Gadgets and that's the only reason and its totally normal.

The 1st is the MS one located in " C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets " if your on Vista 64

The 2nd is 3rd Party Gadgets you install and are located in " C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets "
 
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