Strange Memory Use in Windows XP

[davza]

Hello Everyone

I'm Running 8 VM's on a Dell Quad Core Server. Windows 2000, 2003 and linux all works fine

VMware Infrastructure 3

I need to setup a very small Windows XP machine which runs excel 2003 and symantec AV. The assigned amount of memory is 512 MB

The problem is that the VM starts with around 180 MB of RAM but it starts using loads of memory for no reason. No process is using that memory that I can see. First it oscillates between 200 and 450 megabytes but eventually it uses the whole 512 and virtual memory until the OS fails with problems of memory. I've had reinstalled the machine twice with the same results.

My windows is original and it was downloaded directly from licensing.microsoft.com

Any ideas will be highly appreciated, thanks.

[Rumple]

Sounds like a memory leak in some application.

Open task manager and select the colums to add in VM Memory, Paged Pool and NP Pool (non paged Pool)

See if you see anything growing in size over time...thats probably the memory leak...

[esiebert7625]

I would suspect your Symantec AV as the cause. Is there anything else installed besides those two apps? If you un-install AV does the problem still happen?

[davza]

Thanks for your answer

No, it does not have any growing task, that's excactly my problem, I can't see anything using that memory.

Regards

[esiebert7625]

Just to confirm you do have "Show processes from all users" checked in the Task Manager Processes tab?

[davza]

Esiebert

I did suspected the same but even if I uninstall the AV the problem still remains. Theres nothing else beside those apps and theres nobody using the VM.

The first VM I installed is still running and the biggest process in the task manager is a svchost of 35,000 + KB but the overall memory use reports 1.12 GB

This is crazy buy thanks for your help

[davza]

Sure, it's checked, still it shows no process eating that memory

[esiebert7625]

Try a more powerful tool like process explorer, you can turn on the memory columns under View, Select Columns and then go to the Process Memory tab.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/SystemInformation/ProcessExplorer.mspx

What are you using to see the high memory usage? Is it only through Task Manager or through the VI Client?