Dopus using 7GB of RAM

Opus went a bit nuts...

This has happened a couple of times now on more than one machine. I am running the latest Dopus 10 on Windows 7 X64.

Is there any way I can diagnose the problem? It seems to happen slowly and I tend not to notice until it gets ridiculous and everything grinds to a halt.

It's unlikely to be Opus itself, and probably caused by a shell extension or video codec going crazy.

Whatever the cause, here is how to track it down, from our FAQs:

[ul][li]How to find components causing memory leaks[/li][/ul]

Okay, I'll give it a go, but it could take a while to resurface...

I had the same issue, and could not use any of the debug techniques to determine the cause (the debug tools themselves caused a crash). Instead, I just disabled plug-ins and watched and waited.

Here's my current list of active plug-ins. With these, I have not seen leaking memory in several months now, whereas in the past, it was weekly at least.

Well, today DOpus ran away with 14Gig of memory with only the four plugins shown above enabled. Any speculation about which plug-in might be the cause? Or could it be one of the Archive & VFS Plugins?

Since this is so very difficult to debug, would it be possible to have a memory limit setting such that when exceeded, DOpus terminates itself?

It's most likely a shell extension rather than a plugin, judging from the ones still enabled.

Thanks. ShellExView tells me there are 228 extensions. I can't imagine how I can narrow this issue to prevent it.

Did you try looking at the FAQ Leo suggested?

Yep, we had a dialog late 2011 here:

Occasional excessive memory consumption

I think some of the conversation was offline (or in some other thread).

Unfortunately vmmap itself ultimately crashed. The problem is infrequent enough that I can't get vmmap to run over that duration, so it is not useful here. And since I don't know the steps to reproduce or trigger, it is unclear how/when it will occur.

Most of them are usually Microsoft ones which can usually be discounted. What are the other ones?

Here's the list:


Disable all of them except the MS and Opus ones.

If the problem stays away, enable half the ones you disabled to see if the problematic extension is in that half or the other half, then repeat until you've narrowed it down to a particular extension.

(Assuming it isn't a really nasty problem, like one which only happens when two things are enabled together. That's pretty rare, though.)

Just in case, after enabling/disabling a batch of extensions, fully exit Opus and restart it, to make sure nothing was left lingering in the process. (Some extensions create their own background threads the first time they are used, for example.)

Of course that makes sense. And yet, without a reliable way to reproduce it, I'll really never know when to move onto the next batch. Because I haven't noticed the problem since Oct 2011 (possibly just due to reboots, etc.), quick math tells me the divide and conquer strategy make take several years to narrow!

If the problem only happens once every 9 months then I don't really know what to suggest to help you track it down. There's no good way to test theories if it can take that long to occur (between which time the computer will change anyway).

I think I have figured out what triggers the problem. If I have a lister open with the uTorrent program directory open RAM usage keeps going up indefinitely. Even after closing the window it does not go back down again.

I'll also provide some additional findings.

Since I switched my desktop systems, I no longer have to remote connected via RDP (using Microsoft's RDP client Remote Desktop Connection) to the machine running DOpus. I've not had a problem since, so at this point I'm calling this one related to RDP sessions. The memory swell occurred only late in the night (i.e. only after dropping the RDP connection), and never while I was directly using the system, so this is consistent with the theory.

Hmm, I use RDP as well and still am. Then again it has had a few updates from MS lately.

I use RDP constantly (Win7 to Win7) so it is unlikely to be that, at least not in isolation. (Could still be a factor if combined with other software/drivers/settings, of course.)

From a Mac? Microsoft's RDP client for the Mac is buggy and drops the connection (or fails to connect) frequently. MVP's on their Office board say its not supported in the past two major Mac OS X releases. So this may very well be the difference between what we see. Or not.

No, from a PC, Apple products are banned here.