Kindly be advised we cannot cancel subscriptions or issue refunds on the forum.
You may cancel your Bitdefender subscription from Bitdefender Central or by contacting Customer Support at: https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/help/

Thank you for your understanding.

Memory Leak

Options
2»

Comments

  • Niels
    Options

    Dear RubberBandit,


    You are welcome.


    Best regards


    Niels

  • Hello Everyone,


    I have this problem as well. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one having this problem. I run on a Lenovo Thinkpad with frea*ing Rescue and Recovery which likes to encrypt and backup my files to the same drive, and hide them so that BD reports them on every scan. I switch programs heavily, as I have many clients and modes of connection. I run a small bus full of VPN software at any time. That said, I'm anxious to figure out what this problem is.


    I get this problem daily. I start up my computer and it starts to chug. It's been happening for maybe a few weeks now. Maybe less. The VM Size (task manager > processes > add column > VM Size) hikes up to 816M right now. Yikes. That happens every time I start my computer.


    Being a veteran programmer, I understand that not all software works perfectly with other software. So, there is a bug somewhere. I think there were a few good suggestions up above somewhere. My assumption was always that BD started scanning something big, then I axed it, and it got stuck. But that's just a guess right now. I thought, it's got to be scanning something really big, or scanning lots of things. But you know what? I've had realtime protection disabled since day one. It was too slow for me. So what's the problem?


    I'm going to investigate. I'm sure something will stop it from ramping up like this.


    The main issue in this thread is that there isn't very much useful information. I hate ALL software EQUALLY. It all su*ks. Let's do the best we can do to narrow down the situation. For me, it happens very quickly so hopefully I'll be able to get some good info in here shortly.


    G*d I hope so or I'm going to have to switch to another security suite.


    I'll post an update after a reboot...

  • cod3monk3y
    edited April 2008
    Options

    I started up my computer and let it run to a point of stasis, and kept an eye on the vsserv.exe VMSize which was slowly increasing. I disabled the firewall, antivirus, antispam, etc. There was nothing running yet the vsserv VMSize continued to increase. So I disconnected my network cable and disabled my Hamachi VPN to see if BD was scanning some UDP packets or something. And I turned off my wireless "radios." Still, the VM still kept increasing.


    So I timed it to check the rate of leakage. I did this multiple times, for at least a minute at a time, and then checked overall for longer periods of time. the VMSize on my machine grows by 304-320k/minute and does not waver no matter what I do. The VM tends to jump in 52k steps. It is fairly consistant, with an occasional 2k, and sometimes a small decrease but then a jump of about 104k. At this rate, it would take 44.5 hours to hit 800MB as noted in my first message. And since I'm a huge fan of Hibernate (the shut-down mode, not the ORM code) and use my computer 16 hours a day, it's not surprising that I'd hit the 800 mark fast.


    I shut down every service (Control Panel > Admin Tools > Services) that it would let me. The VM still grew by ~300k/minute. I was left with very low RAM usage by the rest of the system, and a Theme-less XP desktop to boot! I started having 3.11 flashbacks. Then I started killing processes. When I killed bdagent.exe, the slow burn stopped. That's the app that sits in the system tray.


    So I rebooted and tested this theory. I left everything run and only killed the bdagent.exe process, and the burning stopped.


    But, now things appear to be screwed up. I just adjusted some settings in the Security Center and the window is now white and waiting to close. Well, at least I narrowed down my problem to a process (that I should have figured before I even started). But that means I'll have to reboot frequently unless I can figure out why bdagent is leaking.


    I think that this computer came preinstalled with Norton, so I'm going to take Niels' advice and try to scrub the faded memories of NAV off my machine. I'm hoping that cures this slow burn.


    [ps. i also went the route of ordering a boat load of new RAM to solve the problem for the near term because I need it regardless of the BD leak]

  • cod3monk3y
    edited April 2008
    Options


    Timestamp VM Size minutes leak rate (KB/min)
    4/24/2008 9:36 63912
    4/24/2008 10:00 71524 23.80 319.83
    4/24/2008 10:29 81164 29.22 329.95
    4/24/2008 10:57 89884 28.03 311.06
    4/24/2008 12:17 115496 79.25 323.18
    4/24/2008 14:57 166892 160.27 320.69
    4/24/2008 17:12 210328 134.93 321.91
    4/24/2008 17:33 216916 21.12 311.98

    Overall 476.62 321.02


    I ran my machine most of the day today, doing the things I normally do. The numbers are identical to yesterday (320KB/min leakage), which indicates to me that the realtime scanning (which is turned on for programs only) is not the culprit. It's the bdagent just the same as it was yesterday. Tonight I'll try the Norton cleanup suggestion.

  • groeck
    Options
    I think that this computer came preinstalled with Norton, so I'm going to take Niels' advice and try to scrub the faded memories of NAV off my machine. I'm hoping that cures this slow burn.


    [ps. i also went the route of ordering a boat load of new RAM to solve the problem for the near term because I need it regardless of the BD leak]


    I don't think this will help. I have the same problem, and see it on two computers. One of them was an XP installation from scratch,


    so a third-party AV can not be the culprit (or excuse). Only happens if IS is installed.


    Guenter

  • cjean
    Options
    I don't think this will help. I have the same problem, and see it on two computers. One of them was an XP installation from scratch,


    so a third-party AV can not be the culprit (or excuse). Only happens if IS is installed.


    Guenter


    Same thing here on 2 different computers (1 desktop, 1 laptop)


    VSSERV is growing like crazy when I have IE 7 window open and CPU is fluctuating from 0 - 50%. Page file is around 1 gig after a day or 2 of continuous running.


    All this happened after BD Internet Security 2008 on both computers. Since I have a licence for 3, I won't install it before there is a fix.


    On the Desktop I had BD 9 and uninstalled before I install BD 2008


    On the Laptop I had Norton 2005. I did the procedure as above but didn't fix the problem.


    I've never seen this before and looking forward for a fix.


    Regards,


    Charles

  • I have installed BD on 3 Win XP SP2 computers. Two previously had Norton IS which was removed and scrubbed using the Norton Removal Tool and the other was a clean Win XP SP2 install. All three machines exhibit the virtual memory bad behavior described in this forum thread. And yes, I have verified that it is vsserv.exe using all the memory. It is very apparent using the Process Explorer tool available free from Microsoft. Note that you need to turn on the "Private Bytes" column in the View->Select Columns menu to see where your memory has been allocated. I have sent BD support information(tools they had me run) from the clean install Win XP computer but haven't heard back from them. While waiting for a response, I got tired of rebooting my machine everyday and came up with this workaround.


    1) Create a file on your desktop called BitDefenderVSSERVrestart.bat


    2) Edit the file and insert the following commands into it. Just cut and paste it from here.


    "C:\Program Files\BitDefender\BitDefender 2008\vsserv.exe" /service /stop


    net start VSSERV


    3) You may need to edit the path to vsserv.exe if you didn't install BD in the default location


    4) Save the file


    Now each time you sit down at you computer just double click the BitDefenderVSSERVrestart.bat on your desktop. It will shutdown vsserv.exe and then restart it. This will get that process back down to the 60M(still excessive, IMHO) it normally has after a reboot.


    Hope this helps until they get this fixed. Note that I'm in no way affiliated with BD and I'll also be looking elsewhere for my AV needs if this is not fixed soon.

  • ray880
    edited May 2008
    Options

    I tried the suggestion by I Hate Antivirus and added it as a scheduled task to run once a day, it work perfect, but BD needs to fix the problem.


    PS. I have run every uninstall tool and reinstalled BD multiple times and it wont reduce the VM by itself.

  • pip22
    Options
    1. In Windows, choose Start>Settings>Control panel.


    2. Open the System applet.


    3. Click on the Performance tab and then on the Virtual Memory button.


    4. Choose the Let Me Specify My Own Virtual Memory Settings option.


    5. In the Hard Disk drop-down list, choose a location for the virtual memory swap file. This should be the same drive on which you have Windows installed. You probably won't have to change this setting.


    6. For the Minimum and Maximum parameters enter the same value. The value should be anywhere from 2 to 4 times the amount of physical memory you have installed in your computer. Try going with 2 times at first. The higher the number you use the more disk space you need for the swap file. For example, if you have 128MB of memory installed in your computer, you should enter a value of 256 for both the Minimum and Maximum parameters.


    7. Click OK.


    8. Click Yes.


    That advice has been discredited on several performance-related websites. VM should be left for Windows to manage and I can testify that my PC performs better by letting Windows do that. I previously set my VM manually (using same values for min & max) and it was definitley slower.


    It's just one of those so called "tweaks" which don't work in practice.

  • groeck
    Options
    I tried the suggestion by I Hate Antivirus and added it as a scheduled task to run once a day, it work perfect, but BD needs to fix the problem.


    PS. I have run every uninstall tool and reinstalled BD multiple times and it wont reduce the VM by itself.


    I tried that workaround too. Works much better than having to restart the machine every few days.


    Other info


    - Removing Ad-Aware from the system did not help.


    - I also tried installing BD AV 2008 (which does not have the problem) with Comodo Firewall.


    Unfortunately, the two products do not like each other, and internet is completely down if both are installed.


    Guenter

  • I'm running BDIS 2008 as well and started to watch my memory due to this thread. I'm running Vista and noticed that vsserv.exe shows a Commit Size of 600,000K after running for two days. The other memory fields (i.e., memory (Provate Working Set), memory (Working Set), etc.) all seem to be acting ok. I was running CA Internet Security before installing BDIS but I uninstalled it prior to installing BDIS and even tried uninstalling/reinstalling BDIS.

  • rootkit
    rootkit ✭✭✭
    edited June 2008
    Options
    Unfortunately, the two products do not like each other, and internet is completely down if both are installed.


    In this moment i have BD AV 2008 + Comodo and a pppoe connection, no problems !

  • mharney
    Options

    This happens on both the computers I have - changing the scan options to just executables helps, but does not solve the problem. It's clear that there is a problem with the software, and though I have gone to the trouble to jump through BitDefender's hoops to give them the diagnostic information they request via that canned message, I have gotten no answer from them, and no reply. I am tempted to go back to some mainstream software for protection at this point, and may do so if they want to play the silence game. Workarounds and similar nonsense are not the way to handle problems like this, FIXES are. It continuously amazes me when companies provide forums like this, and simply watch them rather than interact. The promise of support should be in tact when you supply the requested information and wait patiently for it.. but it's not like we should have to wait all this time for nothing.