the forums at degreez.net

A lot of people have complained about memory usage in the newest release under Windows. The application itself isn't actively using the memory, but Windows still reserves a large amount of RAM for its operation. I've traced the problem down to two features.

The first feature is disk read caching. This is designed to reduce the amount of thrashing your hard drive has to do. In order to do so, it reads an entire piece, which can be from a sizeable chunk of a megabyte to a few megabytes. RAM usage is equal to the size of a piece times the number of simultaneous uploads the client is performing. This shouldn't be that bad, but Windows' memory allocation is unable to keep its buffer from fragmenting, which combined with the large data blocks causes the buffer to balloon to the point where it may consume all available memory; at which point Windows takes steps to defragment the buffer, which increases CPU usage.

Disabling disk buffering solves the problem for normal operation, but the problem is often still caused by the fast resume feature. In order to provide the convenience of fast-resume combined with the reliability of hash-checking, fast-resume performs what is called "lazy hash checking"; it checks file hashes as pieces or portions of pieces are first read off the disk. By necessity, an entire piece must be read in order to check it, which raises the specter of memory fragmentation again.

I'll be working on some strategies for splitting up the buffers containing the piece data into smaller ones, which would be better able to fit within a fragmented buffer rather than cause it to expand. This will, however, increase overhead somewhat, though hopefully not to a point where it's noticeable.

Thank you for taking care of that, Shad0w, and good luck.

If you're having the problem, I'd like to hear about how large your system cache is. In 2K/XP, right-click on the taskbar and open Task Manager. Click the Performance tab (if there are no tabs and the window looks weird, double-click on its frame). It'll show under Physical Memory: Total, Available and System Cache. Please report them here.

Sorry to see nobody has bothered so here's a screencap of Taskmanager while seeding one torrent and RAM usage sitting currently at 35,820K but has risen at times to 45,000K.

I am not 100% sure that my problem is related as it started only a few days ago after installing 0.3.4. The bittornado GUI will start, ask for the path to save a file, and then the system becomes extremely sluggish, Bittornado becomes non responsive. Looking at task manager, nearly all of my main memory as well as the page file will be fully pegged with massive drive accesses during this time (most likely caused by the page file accesses). The strange thing is that during these episodes the Task Manager does not show BT taking up more than 45MB of main memory ( 45 is the most I have seen it take in the past with multiple file DLs occuring). Often the only way to recover from this condition is to end the process and reboot (which also takes at least 5 minutes to occur rather than the usual few seconds, again probably caused by massive PF memory and main memory usage) AFAIK this all started spontaneously on Thurs. the 8th. I did not do any Windows updates, driver changes, or app installs during this time. 0.3.4 was installed the last week of June and *DID WORK FINE* for about a week. This machine is a XP Pro SP1 box, and I have a 2K Pro box with 0.3.4 installed that BT works fine on.
I am not convinced BT is the problem *internally*, but I was wondering if perhaps the problem is external to BT as in perhaps someone has found an exploit for BT. For example, say a popular torrent such as Naruto the anime series...which often has several thousand people seeding/leeching at any one time every week, is being used by someone to cause this strange BT behavior. I have not gone far down this thought path and looked at what could *specifically* cause this issue I am having, but I thought it was perhaps a possibility.
I cannot get to any point now where I can change the default ports from the GUI, as the GUI becomes unresponsive during the save file dialog. Is there a way to change the ports used by BT by manually editing a file in the BT dir?
Any ideas? -Kib

pref/port range kib
check for viruses, if u installed it and did work fine its probably not the problem

I have the standard memory leak. My computer go down to 30meg of memory after a while(depends on the torrent size) and I have to run the defrag tool in system mechanic to recover from this. My system:

AMD athlon 1900XP
512 PC2100
1 HD 80 meg ATA 100
Windows XP all updates

Mem cache:284124
keeps increasing by 16 to 56b per second, got 2 torrent open

I have been disabling read/write buffering and enabling flush data to disk every 5 min but it didnt seem to improve my condition.

I have a problem with the latest experimental version (and the stable version, I've tried both) freezing up my computer from RAM usage. It usually goes up into the 30,000k+ range, and then my computer will freeze and I can't even use the task manager to shut it down. I have to power off the computer. I don't have a bad system either:

XP fully updated
512megs RAM
PIIII, 2.8GHz
40gb HD

I don't know why it constantly crashes my computer, but it's happened on 2 separate computers.

Geez, did ya guys even read the thread?! There are even a few sticky threads talking about this issue already. To know why, read them before replying unneccessarily.

The new version may solve the problem. We shall see.

Yes, I read the thread. I was merely adding my own comments. Bittornado is still the best client I've used, even with the memory issues.

So is anyone having memory probs with the new version of the client?

Memory usage has dropped here, from the usual 30meg tot 17-22. This is with having 2 torrents open.

I see the high mem only when I have a torrent with lots of peer connections, in the region of 300. Still have to test with al lot of connections. But a normal torrent uses less memory.

Update previous post.


Tested with 172 peer connections 00> mem usage is 36meg

The ram usage for me seems to be the same as 3.4. It's using around 35mb. This is with just one download.

I think Shadow was trying to fix the Memory Leak... not decrease main memory usage since that was never really much of a problem. Anyways...

I have been using 0.3.6 since yesterday and I have yet to experience the memory leak Great job on the fix Shadow



P.S. - The automatic upload setting does not seem to work very well for me. It seems to fluctuate anywhere from 80% to 95% of my upload... sometimes flooding my download. Also, when I went back to manually adjusting my upload rate, the slider bar seemed to stop working. The up and down buttons still worked, but moving the slider itself didnt do anything.