Hi,

I imagine this thread is the source of the FAQ item on the page file...

I run windows XP SP3 with 3GB RAM (4, but windows 32-bit only ever sees 3...), and to get my pagefile to behave I told windows to stop usng the pagefile, rebooted, did a full defrag, and only afterwards reenabled the pagefile.

Now after the full defrag my "free space" was still slightly fragmented from nmovable files (drivercache mostly I think), but I would expect windows to do something like the "wraparound" feature that MyDefrag uses - when allocating a new file, I would assume windows will simply use the first available spaces on the disk, as sequentiually as possible... Instead, it created a "distributed" file allocation for my new pagefile, I don't get it at all!

I'll try to attach the illustration from MyDefrag analysis - the red mess at the top is the new 2GB pagefile.

I will try the sysinternals/microsoft tool referenced above now to see if that helps, but does anyone have any idea why windows did what it did here??

Thanks,
Tao

Hi,

I experienced the same thing...

I am a new user, and after a short trial run I decided to prep my computer (clean up space, disable/delete the completely fragmented pagefile and hiberfil as per the FAQ instructions, etc, and then let the monthly optimization run overnight.

The monthly optimization was running on a Windows XP SP3 French machine, a 32 GB heavily fragmented disk with 9 GB free space, 3 GB RAM, no pagefile, and no programs running (memory commit charge about 600 MB at starting state).

In the morning I found a dialog box telling me "out of memory" or something like that from MyDefrag (I did not think to check the task manager to see how large the process was).

I started the defrag again, and noticed that it had half completed yesterday (the graphic effect on the drive analysis is unmistakeable).

While it was running today, I noticed a few specific interesting points:

• The memory usage definitely looks like a leak, the memory usage grows and grows (from 180 MB to 600 to more than 1 GB over 30-60 minutes while I was watching).
• A more heavily fragmented disk looks like more of a problem (on the second run the program did successfully defrag the whole drive)
• The "memory growth" events did seem related to the defragmentation/writing of large files (as suggested somewhere above) - but remember that the memory use was ever-increasing... Large files may need more memory but the real problem is that the memory is not released/re-used.
• When the program switches to a new drive, the memory is released (from over 1 GB to 60MB memory use for MyDefrag in task manager); whatever the "memory leak"-like effect is, it is somehow tied to the resources associated to the defragmentation of one drive (I have a pretty task manager screencapture to illustrate this if you like)

Sorry I don't have a debug logfile to show you, I only looked for this forum after MyDefrag reached over 1 GB in memory use and I decided something had to be wrong

HTH,
Tao