Memory still leaking all over the place

Winamp v2.7 still seems to leak memory rather badly, like many other versions before it. I have a bare-bones Pentium 166 with 96MB RAM running Windows 95 and Winamp can run it into the ground in the space of 2 to 3 hours. I have no extra plugins installed. One of my friends has a Celeron 466 with 196MB RAM running Windows 98 and has exactly the same problem.

My evidence is this (others might like to try this for themselves - I'd be interested in the results). Start up, load Winamp, press CTRL-ALT-DEL and check that no other programs are running (not even the Winamp Agent). Don't start it playing. Now load Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> System Monitor. Add the "Memory Manager : Memory Allocated" panel, and set the update time to once every minute or so. Go away and make yourself a snack and come back in 15 minutes or so - notice how the graph is completely flat. Now start Winamp playing, and watch the little staircase that builds as Winamp allocates chunks of memory and never frees them again. Looks like a memory leak to me...

In response to other postings about this topic the moderator "Mr. Ice" has said that "Winamp contains no memory leaks", or words to that effect. That seems to me to be a VERY brash statement, similar to stating that there are no bugs in a piece of software. I'm sure that Winamp is a reasonably complicated piece of software and therefore will probably never be completely bug free. Unfortunately that is the nature of software engineering. And in case you're wondering I'm not completely ignorant about this topic - next year is my honours year in a computer science degree in Software Engineering. I'm not stupid enough to claim that any significant piece of code that I produce is bug-free or memory-leak free, much as I would like it to be so.

That said, I still love Winamp, use it on a daily basis and have introduced many friends to it. It is just frustrating to have 56 hours worth of MP3's and only being able to play 2 hours of them at a time without restarting!!

If you would like further details of my system or a copy of the System Monitor output which illustrates my point, I would only be too happy to help. To my mind this is the glaring flaw in an otherwise perfect product, and I really hope that it can be fixed.

Thanks for an otherwise great product!!

- Michael (mjd12@waikato.ac.nz)

Yeah, I've posted complaints in the forums about this also. I hope the problem gets fixed!!!

[Red XXX]

Go to www.analogx.com and get their RAM clearer. Works for me, and its quicker than a restart.

If anyone is interested they can see my results of the experiment I suggested in my previous posting. It is at http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~mjd12/winamp.bmp (about 450KB).

The first flat part of the graph shows Winamp running but not playing. The arrow shows when Winamp was started playing randomly, and Winamp was not touched for the rest of the time. The whole graph represents about 45 minutes, the first 10 of which Winamp was not playing. During the time it was playing it allocated about 35MB, or about 1MB/min. The vertical scale was not done too well, the deceptively small steps of the graph are really chunks about 5-6MB big.

The only other culprit that I can think of is perhaps my sound card driver, however my friend has exactly the same problem with a totally different machine, so I think it can be ruled out.

If you need any further information just ask.

- Michael (mjd12@waikato.ac.nz)

[Air]

I did some checking.. It appears to, after a period of time playing (around 15 seconds) start allocating quite a lot of memory at a constant rate. The odd thing is that it is memory that is *not* attached to the Winamp process.

For instance, I am aware of a very minor memory leak in the module decoder (of about 1 to 3k per song played). Well, aware it exists, but I'm unsure what source is, otherwise I'd fix it . But this is a process leak - as soon as winamp closes, the memory is deallocated. Hence, no lingering load on the system.

In the case of this mp3 leak, however, the system resources are being consumed at an alarming rate, and yet Wintop shows no increase in Winamp's memory allocations.

I thought about it a bit and then I realized something: It isn't Winamp. It's the Windows 98 *disk cache*.

Yea. 'Allocated memory' in Windows counts both the allocated memory by programs *and* by the system. This includes the disk cache. If you make that same graph as you posted a screenshot for and add the 'Disk Cache size' to it, you should see some interesting parallels.

*if not* - then we have a problem.. But as far as my testing showed, there is no serious memory leak.

- Air

[and yea, windows is kinda stupid about the disk cache.. if you have 192 megs of ram, it will happily suck up about 150 to 160 megs of it for the disk cache, effectively making your computer feel like you only have 64 megs of ram].

[This message has been edited by Air (edited December 01, 2000).]

[endless17]

tested winamp on windows2000, no memory leaks as far as i can tell.

tried with both direct sound and waveout ouptputs.

Of course you are absolutely right Air, and if I had thought about it for a little longer I would have realised what it was.

There are a couple of clues which show that it couldn't possibly have been Winamp. For one thing, the chunks of memory allocated never coincided with Winamp starting a new song or anything like that. They also didn't coincide with the size of the songs. The other big clue was the statistic that I presented in my second posting - it averaged about 1MB/min. This is almost EXACTLY the data rate of a 128/44 MP3 file (which all of mine are), so it should have been obvious to me that something was caching it.

So my humblest apologies to all involved!! I didn't really think that Winamp could have gone through so many versions and improvements with such a large bug, but I couldn't think of any other explanation. Thanks to Air for clearing this one up (and just to clarify - the problem exists for Windows 95 as well, not just Windows 98).

Keep up the good work!!

- Michael (mjd12@waikato.ac.nz)

Thanks very much to Red XXX for his tip. Even more suitable for the problem identified may be AnalogX's CacheBooster, which allows you to control the size of your disk cache. I haven't tried using it yet but it looks ideal. Go to http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/cb.htm for this free program.

Thanks once again to everyone who replied, I'm glad I've finally sorted this out.

- Michael (mjd12@waikato.ac.nz)

[Charmander]

how come i never noticed that at analogx before now? i must have only been going to the audio pages! anything to complain about bring all complaints whatever it is to the bitchlist forum - im most likely to be there or reply if necessary!

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Charmander_Powers
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Very Groovy - Yeah Baby Yeah! - Very Shagadelic!

Oh Behave

Unfortunately AnalogX's CacheBooster program that I mentioned in my previous posting flatly refused to install on my system, so I had to find a better way (especially since I found that the maximum disk cache size on my system was set to 96MB - all the RAM in my computer!!).

In fact, no special programs are required to set the size of the disk cache - it can be set very easily in SYSTEM.INI. If you don't know how to edit this file, choose Start -> Run, type sysedit and then choose the SYSTEM.INI window. Now find the [vcache] part of the file (add it if it doesn't exist), and add the following lines directly afterwards:

MinFileCache=<ENTER VALUE HERE>
MaxFileCache=<ENTER VALUE HERE>

The values are in KB. So for example, mine looks like:

[vcache]
MinFileCache=4096
MaxFileCache=16384

16MB is quite a lot for disk cache, you probably want to make this a bit smaller if you don't have much RAM.

My system works much better now, since I still have lots of RAM left after Winamp has been playing for ages.

If anyone has problems with this procedure then I would recommend a program like CacheBooster - it will be easy to use and probably has heaps more options. However I'll do my best to help if you have problems with this procedure - just e-mail me.

- Michael (mjd12@waikato.ac.nz)

...but what about Win2000?
I can't seem to figure this one out. I cannot listen to WinAmp 2.7 for more than 20 minutes at a clip. (then I have to close program and open again - not restart)

I have 128Mb ram and 190 in virt paging file.
Any ideas? This never happened when I was on NT.
Thanks for your help.

[DJ Egg]

Yeah, AnalogX is a top site for free software & music etc.
Also recommended are :
Pow! - for auto shutdown of annoying pop-up ad windows
Supershredder - for waste file shredding (no more recycle bin nonsense)

However, I found a top program a while back called MemoryElevator
Enables you to set the max mem disk cache & also boosts available RAM.

Another wise thing to check :
System Control Panel -> Performance tab -> Virtual Memory settings
It's recommended that you checkmark :
Let Windows manage my virtual memory settings
This then enables usage of the swap file (c:\windows\win386.swp)
You can also checkmark : Let me specify my own VM settings
Here you can set the amount of free HDD space available, plus the figures for the min & max disk cache.

Hope this helps

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DJ-Egg