Out of memory error, tracking down a leak?

[ttfitz]

I've been having trouble since upgrading to the latest version with getting an unhandled exception, "Out of memory" error. At that point, task manager shows NextPVR using over 1 GB of RAM.

Any hints on running this down? I read some messages from last year here with someone tracing it to a leak in an old version ffdshow, but I am running a later one. I thought it mostly happened after watching some m2ts files under Videos, but I got up to 470MB after watching two TS files as recorded by NextPVR - is that high, or about right?

Thanks.

[sub]

Its normal for the memory usage to jump up quite significantly when you start playback for the first time, since this is causing the application to load in all the directshow stuff and decoders etc. How much depends on lots of things, like the decoders you're using etc.

When playback completes, the memory wouldn't typically drop down to where it started, since .NET doesn't unload the libraries (DLLs etc) that it loaded so these stay in memory. Some of that memory that was previously used is marked as freed though. Whether or not it's returned to Windows is up to .NET. Usually it wouldn't return it to Windows unless Windows was running low.

However, subsequent attempts to do playback wouldn't typically push it any higher, ie DLLs are already loaded, and 'previously marked as free' memory will be reused.

It's not unusual for the nextpvr.exe to be using in the order of 250-350MB or memory during playback, with pretty much all of this having been allocated by directshow decoders and renderers etc. 470MB is on the high side, but I wouldn't be surprised if some decoders could cause it to use this sort of memory.

I guess your best bet is experiment and find a pattern to what is happening with your memory. It could certainly be down to a specific decoder causing things to increase continually each time you do playback. Identifying and eliminating that decoder may solve it.