Strange memory leak?

[mastermind]

Greetings, friends.

I was burning a DVD Video backup image (.iso file) to a DVD+R this evening, using Astroburn 1.0.5.0. Everything seemed to work perfectly until approximately 40-50% of the burning process was done - then suddenly astroburn.exe ate an outrageous amount of memory, I had no memory available, the computer went crazy with the pagefile (which is very obvious when you have the pagefile located on a WD Raptor disk - a whole lot of noise), and the burning process was interrupted several times because of buffer underruns. I was in reality unable to operate the computer because it was too busy to react on any user input within a reasonable amount of time.

The burning process completed, though, and the disc worked perfectly afterwards. Immediately after the burning process was completed, memory usage returned to normal.

I don't use any kind of security software, resident anti-virus protection or anything like that (I have ClamWin, but that has to be called manually). My OS is Windows Vista x64, I have a dual core AMD Ahtlon64 X2 4200+ CPU, and 2 GB of RAM. I've got an Nvidia nforce4-based motherboard from Asus (Nvidia's IDE drivers are *not* installed as they create conflicts with my Plextor SATA burner). I haven't seen anything like this since some bad Nvidia drivers in Windows XP a long time ago. That was not triggered by any disc burning though. I feel that it is rational to suspect Astroburn.

Am I the only one who has ever experienced this? I'll try to reproduce it tomorrow in order to learn more about it.

[LocutusofBorg]

would be great if you can reproduce it.

In our test-lab's, we never stumbled across such strange
behaviour. Of course we are curious what exactly happend
with your system

[mastermind]

This whole thing got me curious, so I decided to look a bit more into it right away.

I realize that I can't possibly have given 100% accurate information in my previous post - I can still reproduce large memory usage (on the system as a whole) when burning with Astroburn, but it is not the astroburn.exe process that consumes the memory. Actually, none of the running processes are reported to consume irregularly high amounts of memory! So I'm guessing maybe a driver is snatching all my memory (which Windows doesn't report memory usage for) - but it's only happening when burning with Astroburn. Which makes Astroburn the trigger.

This time, I only burnt on a rewritable disc at 4x speed, to avoid wasting away my discs. Unfortunately I don't have any DVD+RWs supporting higher speeds than 4x. Anyhow, this time memory usage never reached 100% and the computer didn't become ultra slow like before. But - memory usage varied between ca. 91%-95%, which almost never happens - unless I'm running several virtual machines or something like that.

I've taken some screenshots of Resource Monitor:

• While burning with Astroburn on a DVD+RW @ 4x speed
• When the burning process with Astroburn is completed
• When burning with another software (PlexTools Professional XL) with same image, disc and speed (DVD+RW @ 4x speed)

In all tests, I burnt the same image, a backup image of a DVD Video.

Burning with Astroburn:


As you can see, memory usage is irregularly high, and the computer was just started, not running any particularly demanding tasks.

Burning process with Astroburn complete:


Memory usage is back to normal values immediately after Astroburn burning is finished.

Burning with another program (PlexTools Professional XL):


While burning with that program, memory usage is still at normal levels.

The problem seems to have a clear relevance to Astroburn, but I don't understand how or why the memory munching happens.

[mastermind]

After further testing and more varied use of Astroburn, I can now conclude that every time I'm burning an image file with Astroburn, memory usage is extremely high. This applies especially to the burning of DVD image files. Burning of CD-ROM image files have a much lower impact on memory (of obvious reasons).

However, when burning normal projects, both data discs and audio CD, memory usage is low and at normal and expected levels.

I.e. the problem with memory usage only applies to the burning of image files, and more specifically - DVD image files. Memory usage increases gradually during the whole burning process, with the danger of depleting all physical memory (thus chewing on virtual memory and slowing down the whole system) during the last half of the burning process.

This makes Astroburn an unattractive application for burning image files - at least for me. I haven't had the chance to test this thoroughly on other computers with different configurations - yet.