Memory Issues

[PZXN]

I will leave uTorrent on for a while (overnight), and as long as it is on it will continue to increase its memory usage until it maxes out my memory, around 1.92 GB according to the task manager. I have version 2.0 build 18488. I have uninstalled and reinstalled, I even tried reformatting and reinstalling. I am not sure what is going on.

Any ideas would be very helpful, thanks!

[DreadWingKnight]

Is it actually the utorrent.exe process using the ram?

Do you have nvidia's forceware network access manager installed?

[jEaseUs_]

Heya. I'm currently experiencing similar problems. I leave utorrent for about 1 hour and it maxes my memory from 1.2G to 3.92GB when I look in task manager. (the values are somewhat variable obviously) but I got 4GB of ram & win7.64bit

I noticed that when I run sync.exe (a program to flush the disk cache) the RAM is freed from 3.92GB to 1.2GB in about 2 seconds as soon as sync finishes. So I figured it's some kind of read caching (since I'm mostly seeding with about 1.2MBytes/sec) but I noticed that the task manager's reported Physical Memory (MB) Cached decreases as the RAM is more and more used up to 3.92GB and the Available decreases, I thought Cached means how much RAM is used for disk cache. Anyway, after sync, the Cached increases to about 3GB or less (from about 400MB).

Anyway, as a temporary measure flushing disk cache using sync worked for me until I decided to tick the option to disable windows read caches (and also write caches) and let utorrent manage those. Now when I do a sync after a few hours I get only about 0.01GB less (from 1.44GB used), previously was 2.5GB less after sync. Oh and I am not using a pagefile at all. Also not using any nvidia firewall or any nvidia software for that matter (using ati).

Options->preferences->Advanced->Disk Cache ( I actually had all values ticked except the first one with manual cache size) and I did restart utorrent (making sure I waited for it to gracefully shutdown bt.graceful_shutdown was true)

I also tried disabling write disk cache from Device Manager for the harddisk but that didn't seem to do much since I already had utorrent set up as described above, so I let write cache enabled.

Anyway, hope this (mess) helps

Oh and, I did look in 'task manager' and another program called 'process explorer' and utorrent wasn't using the RAM (the 2.5+ extra GB) and I couldn't find any process using them, so it must be the windows disk cache although I didn't know where to look for it to see how much that used (the Cached in task manager must be something else since it decreased))

And also to note that when the whole ram was used, any operation that wanted disk access would be slow as if there was no disk caching enabled, but it was maybe because it was too much cached already (of other files), like when running firefox, there would be lots of disk activity (again, I had no pagefile so it wasn't that).

Edit: I just found that an instance of the program Cacheman was still running in systray, but I do not wish to believe that it was it which had this beautiful effect of utorrent not increasing it's memory usage, however I will tell you in a few hours now that I stopped it.

Edit2: I should also say that when I experienced the memory maximization while using utorrent for at least 1 hour, I had the Disk Cache settings on default(where write is cached by utorrent and read is by windows) and I started changing those to no cache in utorrent which didn't change anything. And as a solution I changed both cached to utorrent as I said above.

[jEaseUs_]

Some update here perhaps. I installed new win 7.64bit enterprise on a different HDD (you may assume I discarded the previous HDD) and I kept the C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming\uTorrent\*.* files which include torrents and *.dat files ie. settings.dat which kept my utorrent settings (which as described in my prev post had Windows read/write caching disabled and worked well on my prev win7 that is, my RAM wouldn't get eaten fully and PC slowing down to a crawl when any disk access was done) however the disabling of Windows read/write cache doesn't seem to have any effect now (in this new win7 installation). I tried restarting utorrent with Windows caching read/write enabled, then again with them disabled (those settings in utorrent of course) and windows is still eating all my RAM. Considering I was doing about 2.5MB/sec of upload and another 2-3 MB/sec of download (MB=MiB, not Mbps) so the RAM filling was done in a matter of a few minutes.

I installed Cacheman again and if I was leaving File Caching to Windows Controlled then the same behaviour was happening. Only when I was using manual size ie. 100MB or CacheMan controlled 400MB or so was the limit and no RAM eating would occur.

So, I was on to find a free solution for this here: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/ntcacheset_e.html

Basically I got SetSystemFileCacheSize V0.3 which is 4Kb in size

"With the SP1 for Windows 2003 Server Microsoft implemented a new API function for limiting the file cache's working set minimum and maximum size permanently: SetSystemFileCacheSize. "

then I made a shortcut for it and I appended " 398 400" (w/o quotes, there's a space before 398) to the .exe filename in the Target, thus making the program set the minimum and maximum cache working set (wtw this is lol), and so acting much like Cacheman did(except Cacheman had a service running and making the cache stay at 400MB by updating it ie. once every second or so I guess; plus it was a trial program and it would expire in 30 days). By the way this setting is permanent so you don't have to run this program again, unless you want different params.

So right now, in utorrent I have all Disk Cache options ticked, except twO:

-Reduce memory usage when the cache is not needed

-Turn off read caching if the upload speed is slow.

And I have the 1024 value on the first setting, that is 1GB of cache for utorrent. So utorrent is using about 1.1GB (aprox) at all times, and my RAM is at 3.5GB constantly (out of 8GB btw) whilst before the SetSystemFileCacheSize it was always at around 7.6GB or so (maxed out) and almost every action in windows (ie. clicking the Start menu) would be real slow and use the disk as if paging of sorts (but page file was off btw that is, no pagefile for me ty)

So, for those having problems with utorrent eating up all RAM or using all the RAM and slowing down the system to a crawl, maybe this will help, as it sure did help me.

Enjoy!

EDIT: looks like you must run SetSystemFileCacheSize every time on startup, settings don't remain after reboot.

PS: also note(for those that this is relevant) that I was using TrueCrypt and had some big drives mounted which are actually huge files aka containers on a NTFS partition, so Windows might have cached those big files aka containers, even if it wouldn't have cached the files that utorrent was accessing, which were inside the container(s). On another note, on my prev win7 I had only about 80GB in two containers that were files residing on NTFS partitions, and every other container was in a raw partition (which I must say, containers in a raw partition seemed to have faster access (for me at least) than containers (as files) inside a NTFS partition; maybe due to windows caching too, for in the latter situation windows would cache the big file aka container also, not just the files on the mounted virtual drive(which would be the case only in the former situation: the container as raw partition)