Vista is using over 1.2 million handles?!

[Rurik]

Edit: Looks like I found the big problem, later in the thread.

We just started using Vista Business on our new machines at work. I needed to migrate some information from another computer, so I placed it on a SATA drive, attached it and copied it over. It is 15 files composing 20GB. However, as I tried to copy them over, I immediately received an error message of "Out of Memory". If I hit "Try Again", the error would pop back up. If I skip the file and go to the next, I'd get the same error on the next file.

I check Task Manager and I see:
System:
Handles: 1293496


Right now, I'm OUT of memory, literally! I've closed down every foreground app except Firefox and explorer, and I have 2 MB free (I had to kill some services just to start Sysinternals procexp).

I had to check with my other XP boxes to form a frame of reference, they're all using between 15K and 20K handles.

This may be associated with another weird Vista error I'm having.
I have a bunch of movie files from my DVR (recorded shows) that I watch. Once I finish watching most, I delete them to save space. 90% of the time, if I watch a video, then Shift-Delete it, it will immediately pop back into the directory. The file is deleted, but explorer.exe is keeping a locking handle on the file that I have to manually track down and kill to get rid of the file in the directory. Though, if I do a regular Delete, it usually deletes it fine.

 

[Finn]

Que to the first 'its superfetch' posters to arrive..

Go ahead and disregard his system failed to out of memory error while having 1440+mb cached crap.

 

[Cyrilix]

I have ~11500 here running a Vista 32-bit machine, so you may have some kind of really weird problem. Either that, or your task manager is doing something funny. I got to tell you though, that 2 MB free is not a problem. Vista uses all your memory until there's barely any left, although on mine, it says 40 MB Free, 1540 MB Cached.

 

[Rurik]

After a clean reboot, I see what you mean about the free memory. It's sitting at 34 now. But, I'm sitting here monitoring the handle count. After 50 minutes of uptime it's up to 43K now. As I'm watching it now, it's steadily increasing, even with nothing running. It's increasing by about 3-4 handles per second, continually.

I just started killing processes one at a time with procexp and monitoring the handle count. I think I found the culprit: one of the Vista Gadget processes. As soon as I killed it, the handle count dropped immediately to 20K and hasn't grown. Will reboot to try and start over and get more details.

 

[Rurik]

I localized it to AsG_Manager.exe. "Gadget Manager MFC Application" C:\Program Files\ASUS\ScreenDUO\AsG_Manager.exe

Yup, the crappy SideView device that came with the motherboard. I have it hooked up to show pictures, and it's the culprit. Oh well, now this information is catalogged for others to read.

The mobo is an Asus P5B Premium, reviewed by [H] here: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI5MiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
It's using their Asus ScreenDuo Sideview and drivers.

 

[Cyrilix]

Good to see that you've solved the problem.

while (true)
{
    CreateUselessHandle();
}

Edit: I also forgot to mention that I'm relieved it wasn't another one of those things that went terribly wrong with Vista.

 

[pxc]

My Vista 64 system that is up for about the same time (73 hours) has 33900 handles. It's not increasing steadily.

I was guessing some kind of resource leak.

 

[martinth]

Vista handles RAM like Unix based OS's, that is...It cache's it.
You actually have much more than 2mb of ram to use.