"That looks like a GDI leak"

re: “That looks like a GDI leak”

Drazen Dotlic — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 06:46:00 GMT

This has to be the worst leak I have ever seen :))) One would think that utilities from big manufacturers like Toshiba, especially for laptops (who have traditionally had less memory than desktops) get tested at least a little bit before shipping...

re: “That looks like a GDI leak”

Omar Shahine — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 17:50:00 GMT

I don't seem to have this utility on my tosh, but I removed a bunch of crap. I do have the powermanagement stuff installed though.

re: “That looks like a GDI leak”

Jonathan Hardwick [MSFT] — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 18:58:00 GMT

Yeah, I'm amazed this one got past testing - it's not like you even need any special tools to spot the leak, just fire up Task Manager and watch the numbers grow! The good news is that you can still use the "Toshiba Console" to control power management.

Omar, you can probably find it in c:\windows\system32\tpwrtray.exe if you want to experiment with DOS attacks :-)

re: “That looks like a GDI leak”

James Hancock — Mon, 19 Jul 2004 20:24:00 GMT

Why, in the age of Windows XP, would you ever have those stupid power management applicaitons installed?

You can do all of the stuff that they do using Windows' own screens and man, they're hogs. IBM's is horrible too.

re: "That looks like a GDI leak"

Jonathan Hardwick [MSFT] — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 03:52:00 GMT

The vendor apps give you a much finer granularity of control than does XP's power management stuff - see e.g. http://blogs.msdn.com/jonathanh/archive/2004/03/20/93259.aspx. But I'm in total agreement on the hog front!

re: "That looks like a GDI leak"

rakslice — Wed, 11 May 2005 03:35:05 GMT

In the past few weeks, sometimes when my XP box has been up for a while, it seems to suffer GDI-related strangeness.

Windows widgets fail to draw or function properly (pull down & context menus don't appear except for the item my cursor is over, the wrong icons start appearing in explorer as if already-loaded ones are being reused, etc.). Newly-opened applications sometimes won't open some of their subwindows & toolbars, or sometimes just die immediately, sometimes with just a beep. Only part of the (few) error messages I do get obliquely point at problems with GDI objects (brushes, palettes, etc.) but all of them seem rare -- i.e. not well_sanitized for the non-developer public -- such as the 'Value creation failed " at line 903' I just got from the Welcome screen when this was happening a few minutes ago. Which isn't the wierdest -- sometimes I come back to my locked system and the Welcome screen is inexplicably replaced with the non-fast-user-switching locked system login prompt, even though the setting isn't changed.

The best-sanitized error messages I've gotten when this was happening are from Adobe Photoshop. That's ironic considering how badly behaved Acrobat is, but I guess the people at Adobe really know what side their bread is buttered on. =)

Normally I can close a couple of open programs, and the next few things I open work fine, but the problem quickly returns. Rebooting the system makes it go away for much longer.

When this was happening a few minutes ago, the prog with the most GDI handles had about 1700 -- Winamp 5 with the stock "Winamp Modern" skin. (It uses about 1400 at launch.) Next were wisptis.exe with 700 and explorer.exe with 500, which is about right considering my 8 day uptime.

Still, that doesn't seem like a lot if they're only limited by available memory (taskman shows 620000K physical available) and a 32-bit handle numbering space. And it doesn't seem like any running app is actively leaking a lot of them. So is there some other limitation I don't know about?

-AT

re: "That looks like a GDI leak"

jonathanh — Wed, 11 May 2005 05:15:49 GMT

My first reaction would be to run a thorough check for adware and malware - if this just started happening a few weeks ago, something's definitely not right.

re: "That looks like a GDI leak"

rakslice — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:58:28 GMT

I think the behaviour I described above was the result of hitting the desktop heap limit on my windows logon session.

I have a hunch that people experiencing the same problem will find this page.

The size limit can be raised from the default limit of 3072kB.

See:

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=238&pgno=1

More info at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tonyschr/archive/2005/05/25/desktop-heap-limitations.aspx

re: "That looks like a GDI leak"

Eric — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:51:38 GMT

Wow, rakslice, did you really come back and comment on your post, 2 years later? Nice. :D

I've been having this exact same problem that you described ever since upgrading to a multi-monitor system. The symptoms indicated on the pages that you mention though are definitely not the symptoms that you were talking about, or that I'm getting.

Not sure if I should mess with this desktop heap, as I just had that problem a few minutes ago, but the dheapmon thing that I got there only showed 25% usage...