Memory Leak in Windows 2000 Server Terminal Services

[msutter]

Hello
On a Windows 2000 Advanced Server I've got terminal services enabled. If I monitor the virtual memory space, allocated by the termsvr process, I notice, that it is continously growing about 50 MB per day.

This definitly will crash my server so every three weeks, depending on the available memory.

The currently used memory by the process is within a normal range of about 8 MB. The huge virtual memory space doesn't make any sense at all. That it keeps growing is even more destareous.

Anyone an idea?
Marco

 

[ShackDaddy]

One thing you might want to consider is how long sessions stay connected or disconnected. Each session has it's entire registry (HKCU) loaded in RAM, as well as a lot of its profile. What you need to do is log on as an administrator and open up Task Manager. Look at the processes tab and add the Mem Usage, Peak Mem Usage, and VM Size columns to the view. Check the checkbox in the bottom left that will show you all system processes, and click on the column header for Mem Usage. The processes will sort by memory usage and you will be able to see where it is that your memory has gone, and whether it is actually leaking in a single process or whether you are merely having more and more processes stay open on the server. Let us know what you come up with. Depending on which process has ballooned, there are different solutions.

ShackDaddy

 

[msutter]

Unfortunately it is the TERMSRV service itself whose virtual memory space is growing. The memory usage allocated by the active sessions is changing as they start and end. Actually I cannot see a relation between the growing of the termsrv's memory and the number of active sessions.

 

[ShackDaddy]

I wonder what would happen if you used a batch file to kill the TERMSRV process at 3am every morning and restart it. Either that or a midnight reboot one night a week. I checked my servers, and my memory usage is averaging around 3mb when people all get logged off, and the system has been up for several weeks.

The only thing I would suggest is making sure that you've gotten all the service packs installed, which I'm sure was the first thing you did.