Morning

I believe you have a memory leak in the program, I think it started in Beta 9, since you have been cranking these out at an alarming rate I figured you would just run over it but as of Beta 12 it is still there.

Tom

Hi

I will try to describe the situation as best I can , the actual program shows that it is using about 40K including the hook application, and as far as features, I do not use it to control wallpaper only to provide a secondary taskbar and two additional buttons on each of my windows. I also run a memory management app called Cacheman 7 (OCD issues ) which provides a tray icon that displays memory usage. I noticed last week that my system which normally uses about 2GB of memory was slowly over the course of the day gradually consuming more memory. The task manager does not reflect this usage in the running programs (including DF) however by the following morning I was in the 3GB range and had to do a restart to recover the memory and start the cycle over. I started looking around to see if I could determine what was eating up the memory space but was not able to identify it. Then after a visit to the DF board I saw that there was a new beta out (112) so I opened up DF and told it to search for updates it found 112 and installed it when DF rebooted itself my memory usage icon in the taskbar dropped from 2.5GB to 1.9GB. So I waited until this morning and when I got up the memory usage was at 2.9GB so I exited DF and restarted it it memory dropped down to 1.9GB. Maybe memory leak was the wrong term to use but somehow it appears that DF is allocating space for something in memory and not reclaiming it I can go back and start installing older versions if you like to see which one starts the issue (I think it is 9) or if there is anything else I can do to help test I would be happy to do so.

Tom

I tested this out, and I see DF gaining about 20 MB virtual size over 50 wallpaper changes, and 7 MB for its private bytes. I will keep testing for you Jon.

I ran a battery of tests, the wallpaper is the only thing coming up, but you have to go through a couple hundred changes to accrue even 10 MB....

@ OP, What do you have your wallpaper settings on? Rotation time is important... I couldn't imaging DF taking up that much space even if you left it on for weeks with a 30 second rotation, and I've done that....

I will leave DF on with as short a timer as possible tonight and give a report in the morning.

Jsut a small report, after enabling all title bar buttons it seems that with enough spam DF will retain a few MB for itself. This is 100+ windows and all titlebar buttons. I doubt this is it either, though clicking reset leaves one title bar button, is this expected? I remember something about a premade titlebar button but I don't remember for sure.

I am NOT using DF to change my wallpaper, I will do some additional testing today (I currently have it disabled) too see if I can determin for sure it is DF causing this.

Tom

Well as Jon would know I am an extremely thorough tester and I ran tests for 3 hours last night with nothing. the overnight test also produced no change. The only way to get DF to use more resources is spamming next picture.

What OS are you using?

And may I suggest using Process explorer from sysinternals? It keeps track of processes much better than the default, and may shine through which program is leaking.

Kevin

Thanks for looking at this. I am running Windows 7 Home Premium X64 and I do use process explorer (great program ). At this point I am not sure if this "qualifies" as a true memory leak the PE doesn't really reflect the additional memory usage as part of a running process, it almost seems as though some thing is allocating a block of memory to use somewhere else and then just abandoning it. I shut off DF completely today (and I miss it). The problem appears to be considerably less than it has been the last few days. I have not installed or upgraded any programs other than DF in the last two weeks which taken with the fact that when I did the update from 111 to 112 freed up a large block of the memory led me to believe that it might be DF causing the problem. At this point I am not sure exactly what is going on. Take a break for a while I will continue to turn off some apps to test and will update the thread IF I can figure out what the heck is going on. Thanks again.

Tom

No problem, its what beta testers do.

ops: It turns out that this was an operator head space problem, in other words I shot myself in the foot. I just bought an SSD for my machine and am planning on installing it this weekend. Since I never rush into anything to do with PC's I have spent the last couple of weeks reading/researching the care and feeding of these faster than lightning little gems. So one of the things that is apparently not good for them is a lot of random writes, since this will be my boot drive I know the best I can do is try to minimize these writes as I could never even hope to eliminate them. One of the suggestions that I researched was about changing the Windows swap file, either placing it on a different drive or based on installed Ram and usage habits eliminating it completely. Because I have 8GB installed and almost never exceed 2.5GB of use I chose to just eliminate it. Well I use a memory management program called Cacheman 7 and one of its functions is to take over the management of the swap file. Apparently it did not care at all for me taking away "its" swap file and started leaving blocks of memory all over "its" drive. I put back a 3GB swap file on the drive yesterday and that seemed to stop my issue. I don't really understand why it would try to establish a swap file when I obviously don't have any memory overflow to write data to it but I plan on writing them today to ask for a clarification on this (I would eventually like to move it to another drive and don't want to "upset" the program again). I assume that since my memory usage is prudent I won't really have to worry about this actually writing any data to the file but after what happened I'm just not sure. I would like to say thanks and apologize to Jon, Kevin and any of the other tester who invested their valuable time on this. I promise to be more careful in the future and do better research before jumping to conclusions.

Tom

BTW: Does this mean I can forget about applying for a beta tester position

I think it's awesome that you had the honesty to come back and explain what happened!

Alot of people would have just gone silent to avoid implicating themselves as the problem..

I remember hair, I used to have that.

Tom

Thank you very much for actually coming back and following up, users like you are the best. And its an open beta nowadays, so you can report and help all you want. I just happen to be one of the oldest beta testers around, from the days of the private betas...