Why does the recording service and gbpvr.exe continually eat ram?

[merak69]

How come the recording service and gbpvr.exe keep taking more and more ram the longer they are running? After 4 days, the recording service was up to 88mb... After 8 days, it was at 120mb... After 10 days (only 2 days passed this time because of heavy recording I'm guessing), it was up to 175mb.

It doesn't it ever release the memory unless I restart the service or restart the computer. Why is this?

EDIT: gbpvr.exe grows too but not nearly as much or as large...

[sub]

It shouldnt continually grow. It should reach a plateau. Its fairly normal that it should use quite a bit of memory, like nearly all .net apps. How much exactly depends on a few things, but mainly on your EPG. If you're in the US with a large number of channels and a large number of days, this will use the most memory. You can trim back the number of channels or days if it concerns you.

It uses ram when it needs it, then frees the memory, but because of the way .net memory management works that memory is not freed back to the operating system unless the operating system really needs it (ie, critically low elsewhere). That memory is available if the operating system tells .net that it needs it, but it only does do this if it really needs to.

That said, it also depends how you're viewing that memory usage. Task manager does not give a indication of real memory usage. For example, bring up the task manger so you can view the memory usage, then start GBPVR.exe. It'll probably be listed as using 50 - 60MB. If you click the minimize button on the GB-PVR window, task manager will show it as only using 5 - 10MB of memory.

[merak69]

That said, it also depends how you're viewing that memory usage. Task manager does not give a indication of real memory usage. For example, bring up the task manger so you can view the memory usage, then start GBPVR.exe. It'll probably be listed as using 50 - 60MB. If you click the minimize button on the GB-PVR window, task manager will show it as only using 5 - 10MB of memory.

I guess I'll have to see how high it'll really get...

Does GBPVR.EXE run all the time? Its currently running but I dont have any windows for it. I'm guessing its for the MVP, yes?

[sub]

If you're running MVP servers, then yes, there will be some hidden sessions running in the background.

[sub]

What EPG source are you using, and how many channels/days of EPG data do you have?

As an indication, I just checked my main lounge PC, which has been running v0.97.13 for a few weeks without rebooting. Its got about a weeks worth of listings for about 30 channels. Its using about 45MB. I do know that some zap2it users with a large number of channels have easily used 200MB.

[merak69]

What EPG source are you using, and how many channels/days of EPG data do you have?

As an indication, I just checked my main lounge PC, which has been running v0.97.13 for a few weeks without rebooting. Its got about a weeks worth of listings for about 30 channels. Its using about 45MB. I do know that some zap2it users with a large number of channels have easily used 200MB.

I'm using Zap2it with 7 days of retention for 71 channels.

[sub]

zap2it also use a lot more memory than the same amount of data in XMLTV, which is what I use. This extra overhead is required for hold the stream of data sent by zap2it, and for holding the intermediate data as its transformed from the zap2it format to the format used by GB-PVR (which is structured very similar to XMLTV layout).