Windows XP SP3 Guest OS freeze and application reports errors after running 3~6 days

[sbm1]

Overview:

Ifix SCADA Application running on Windows XP SP3 Virtual machine ;  Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit Host with 16GB RAM running VMware Workstation 15 Player,  4GB RAM allocated to Windows XP Host in VMWare Setting. 

Application runs fine for few days (some times 3 and occasionally up to 7) and then couple of errors popups from IFix application and the screens are frozen, only way-out is to hard restart the XP from Vmware player.

Details:

Errors reported from IFix components as below

Error1:From Workspace application "Error Number -2147212767 (80042221) User not registered within security" see screenshot attached 

Error2: From Historical Collect "Error making file as closed. File may be corrupt" OR sometimes as  "Can't open data file- File access conflict" 

After this incident repeated 3-4 times we started monitoring Windows XP memory usage from task manager everyday morning& evening. ➢ Its noted that PF usage keeps growing every day by ~ 75 Mb from approx 500MB at the start to 800MB+ in these days and then somewhere it freezes.

➢Its also noted that, 4GB is allocated to the Guest in vmware settings but only 3GB is reflected in windows XP properties, possibly due to the known issue "PCI hole" as per KB article 1014006. 

Any advise on the root cause? PF usage increasing is normal or not? Is it recommended to allocate 3GB or less for Windows XP guest compared to 4GB which is configured now? Basically Ifix application minimum RAM requirement specified is 512MB.

Thanks!

[RaSystemlord]

I'm not familiar with that application, but in general ...

It looks like your application has a memory leak problem, resulting in more and more memory being used, until it breaks - possibly associated with some other problem within the application. Based on your description, I'm not sure whether this truly represents what you see ... you talk about memory usage growing per day - is there a reboot between days? If there is a reboot, then it looks like the application has a different problem.

New application versions are not really supported with XP anymore - is this a concern in your case?

As for memory usage - if you compare to physical computers, there are no 3.3 GB RAMs or typically 3 GB installed. You have either 2 GB or 4 GB. It doesn't make a difference if XP 32-bit cannot use all of the 4 GB.

As for memory consumption 800 MB - that is where everything can end per process. To my knowledge, the max memory is not an exact science (/per process), but it looks like your application kills itself at this point. Perhaps some process could go up to 1 GB, but that is the absolute maximum, I think that in some cases it dies at 700 MB.

So, I cannot see any VMware related problem in this. If there was, it would probably be a disk problem, but then you would get a disk related error message from VMware (not only from OS, coming from some disk hardware or USB-disk reason).

As for the application - not sure what it does, but clearing out TEMP/TMP between reboots might have an affect for getting a better start with it. Also, an ordinary user cannot write into System TEMP/TMP, which is a source for all sorts of errors, including a crash without a proper error message, because that cannot be written into System Temp.

Anyway, if you mean that it breaks after 3-6 days and is NOT rebooted in between, this looks like a memory leak in the application and there is nothing more to it.