Access Connections egregeious RAM and CPU usage [ Edited ]

[davodavo]

Running Access Connections 5.2 (build 7xcx13ww) on WinXP SP3 on a Thinkpad X31 with built-in 802.11 adaptor.  No ethernet or other networking ports connected.  As long as the GUI isn't up, no problem.

But if I open the GUI and hit the Find button, about 50% of the time the tool goes into some sort of verrrrry long loop, burning as much as 30 minutes of CPU time and expanding the memory footprint to ~500 MB of "Mem Usage" and 1500 MB of "VM Size" (per Windows Task Manager).

The "solution" is to kill the GUI and restart it, but something is vewy scwewy awound hewe.

Message Edited by davodavo on 04-25-2009 07:55 AM

Message Edited by davodavo on 04-25-2009 07:57 AM

[LANOgre]

Make sure when you update Access Connections, you also update the Power Management driver, Hotkeys and Wireless LAN driver.

WLAN driver:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-70504

Access Connections v5.21:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?sitestyle=lenovo&lndocid=MIGR-4ZLNJB

Hotkeys:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-68000

Power Management driver:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-4GXPEG

[davodavo]

Installed all the packages you indicated, except for the Intel WiFi driver set (because I'm running on the IBM b/g card).  Everything works pretty much as it did before, a little better.

But things are still messy in the CPU utilization and memory consumption of AccessConnections.exe:

  - when you push the "find" button for WiFi networks, the CPU utilization goes to 100% and memory footprint jumps by 20 MB or so...it jumps up every time you push the find button and it doesn't decline again even though the base-station iconography disappears

  - just leaving the AC GUI open while there's a normal WiFi connection in place, the GUI uses about 25% of CPU indefinitely

  - the AC GUI also grows its memory footprint by about 250 kB/s indefinitely

  - after 3 CPU minutes of normal operation (around 10 minutes), the AC GUI is using 275 MB of memory and 250 MB of VM space

  - after  10 CPU minutes of heavy use (switching networks several times), over 1 GB each for RAM and VM

Looks like a memory leak to me...

Problem occurs when:

  - GUI is up on screen showing the map

  - there's a connection and the green-expanding-circles animation is running around the base station you're connected to

  - the Find button is pushed and several available networks are displayed

Problem stops when:

  - GUI is minimized or is showing the "Location Profile" or "Options" tab

  - there's no active WiFi connection

  - after 10 CPU minutes, you disconnect and re-connect to the same network.  This is a memory footprint of over 250MB, but at least it stops expanding

  - GUI is terminated

Message Edited by davodavo on 04-28-2009 12:52 PM

Message Edited by davodavo on 04-28-2009 04:25 PM

[LANOgre]

I ran Access Connections v5.21 on two systems and didn't find any evidence of a memory leak.

Opening the GUI with an active connection does run about 25% usage, which is on par for an active application.

Access Conections.exe was running about 38MB.  Letting the system sit for 30 minutes saw only minor fluctuations (couple 100K max)

Doing Find WLAN did cause the app to jump to 45MB.  Subsequent searches, never caused another jump in memory usage.

No signs of the 250K/s memory increase.

Switched back and forth between two wireless networks for 10 minutes saw a 3MB increase in memory usage. This was about a 110K increase per switch.

All of this was with a continuously open GUI.  After all this and left idle for 3 hours, still at 48MB memory usage.

Are you running this in a virtual session? If so, does it happen in the main operating system?

[davodavo]

Hi,

Thanks for checking in on this.  So no, I'm not running any virtualization or weird window system extensions -- this is plain vanilla WinXP.

In the interests of science, I tested to see if there was any difference in memory utilization on the external display (16 bit 1280x1024) and the internal LCD (32 bit color depth x 1024 x768.  Doesn't seem to make much difference.

I'll do some testing under different application / user configs to see if there's something that triggers this.  I tend to run a lot of apps (Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Pidgin, Yahoo Widgets, Sunbird) -- maybe there's an interaction...

[davodavo]

OK, logged in as a different user, didn't start any other apps.  Same symptoms.

Guess I'm just lucky.

Forgot to mention I'm running XP Pro and running with full administrative permissions.  About the only thing unusual about my system is the number of apps installed and the fact I have all my user data in the windows encrypted file system.  

This does not effect any of the access connection or OS files.

[tzuyang]

Did you enable the logging feature in accesss connections?

although i still do find with access connections, cpu usage is about 2% in idle every say 10secs or so

[davodavo]

Oooh, good question about logging in AC, but no...it's not on.  All the user selection options are exactly as they were left from the install cycle, except for "enable sounds" (which gives a little musical jingle when you connect/disconnect from the internet).

Just for fun, here's a set of stats from my system running Access Connections open for a while.

Link to Picture

Moderator Note; Picture converted to Link.

Message Edited by andyP on 05-07-2009 05:39 PM

[LANOgre]

Try uninstalling, including removing all profiles, reboot and reinstall.  Then make a single profile and see if the problem still happens.

[davodavo]

Did the uninstall / reboot / reinstall / reboot dance.

No change to memory / CPU usage -- other than all my WEP passwords are gone