Out Of Memory Crashes On Windows 7 32bit System

HaJen
HaJen
in General

I have a Laptop running a Intel i3 CPU with 4GB of memory and Windows 7_x32 Home Premium, my swap/pagefile is default, no manual tweaking. When i run certain programs (Photoshop Elements 11 and especially Photomatix 4.2 Pro) the software crashes, stops responding or - in the best of cases - lets me save my work before it closes.


Support staff of these software providers have evaluated some in-depth trace-logs and came to the conclusion that my computer was running out of memory and therefore crashed the software. Running out of memory not because i litteraly ran out of memory (By the time of the crashes Windows printed a stable allocation of ~2.3GB of physical memory) but because the memory was/is fragmented. With the kind permission of the staff i corresponded with i'd like to quote parts of their messages:


Many thanks for this log file - it gives some very useful information. It appears that you are suffering from massive memory fragmentation for some reason. By the time it ran out of memory, there was a 1.2GB area of memory that was just full of fragmented memory sections, each being less than 1MB in size, whereas under normal circumstances you should have had a single block of probably at least 800MB there. I'll plan to analyse the log in more detail, but it appears almost certain that there is something particular on your system which is responsible for fragmenting your memory like this.


We had one other person report a similar problem a while ago, and never got to the bottom of what was causing it. It's possible that an anti-virus program or some driver may be the culprit. I understand that Symantec Anti-Virus has been known to cause memory fragmentation.


If you are comfortable with trying this, it would be useful if you could do another run with your anti-virus not running - if possible not just disabled, but actually not running at all. No need for a trace - this would just be to see if you still run out of memory in the same way. Also, another possible line of testing would be to try booting your system in safe mode, and try another run, in case some driver or background service is causing the problem.


Thanks again for your continued help in tracking down this issue.


After that i tried to disable everything related to Bitdefender on this computer, no luck. I decided to uninstall the entire BD package for the purpose of testing Photomatix 4.2Pro and PS Elements 11. Upon reboot i put some heavy load on the computer, generating five HDR pictures with 7 RAW-pictures of 36.5MPX each with Photomatix. I mapped the pictures as i always did before the trouble began. Windows printed close to 3GB, still 500MB left... The program(s) didn't crash. Afterwards i sent the newest trace-log to the staff at hdrsoft. Here the answer:


Many thanks for following this through with us. The log you sent looks much better - you start out with a 1.4GB block free, and even after a lot of processing you've still got an 800MB block sitting there. It's very useful to know that BitDefender has this issue. You'd think it would not be easy to achieve that kind of memory fragmentation in another process, but they managed it somehow. From the forum, it does appear as you say that it has a tendency to do this to people. Sounds like it's not a good choice for 32-bit systems at the moment.


Would it be possible for BitDefender to address this issue?

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