Spb Finance 2.0 - Memory Leak

[Clinton Fitch]

Group,

Has anyone noticed what appears to be a serious memory leak with Spb Finance 2.0? I'm trying to track down if it is just my device or a true-blue issue.

How bad is it? Well, 20.9MB of free memory then 2.0MB in about 2 hours of sitting there without ActiveSync or any other applications running. As soon as I uninstalled it, the leak went away. Now it could be that I've got some DLL's not playing nice with each other or it could be the application itself.

I've contacted Spb but was curious if others had seen this behavior.

Thanks,

[Darius Wey]

I experienced a memory leak with Pocket Plus 3.0 - which I've temporarily resolved by removing the Today plug-in. However, I've been helping Spb identify the issue, so we may see an update released in the future. Anyway, I digress - now I'm experiencing a different leak altogether, and one of the applications I have installed is Spb Finance. I'll take off the Today plug-in and run it through a day's worth of work and report back my findings.

[Clinton Fitch]

I experienced a memory leak with Pocket Plus 3.0 - which I've temporarily resolved by removing the Today plug-in. However, I've been helping Spb identify the issue, so we may see an update released in the future. Anyway, I digress - now I'm experiencing a different leak altogether, and one of the applications I have installed is Spb Finance. I'll take off the Today plug-in and run it through a day's worth of work and report back my findings.

Darius,

I'm running Pocket Plus 3.0 as well and haven't had the issue since uninstalling Finance. I did disable the Today Plug-in for Finance as well before uninstalling it and still had the leak.

The drain I had was rapid though, I couldn't go more than two or three hours without being out of physical memory and having to soft reset.

Regards,

[ctmagnus]

I've noticed a slight memory with Pocket Plus 3.0 (using the other non-Diary plugins as tabs) as the only Spb plugin on my Today screen. However, if I enable Diary 1.5.1, that leak increases greatly.

[Darius Wey]

I'll give Diary a bit of a workout too. Something's chewing my memory and I'm not likin' it. ;)

I'll report my findings here over the next couple of days.

[Clinton Fitch]

I've noticed a slight memory with Pocket Plus 3.0 (using the other non-Diary plugins as tabs) as the only Spb plugin on my Today screen. However, if I enable Diary 1.5.1, that leak increases greatly.

Interesting....

I'm using Diary 1.5.0, Build 1698 and Pocket Plus 3.0.0, Build 3831. I have diary as tabs in Pocket Plus, not as a stand alone plug-in and I'm not seeing any type of a memory leak.

I'm really curious now Darius what you find... Thanks to all of you for posting back. I'm somewhat glad it isn't just me. :)

[mrjeff42]

Hi,

I've been experiencing memory loss too - on the Axim, not personally (I hope).

I'm running Pocket Plus 3.0 with all the available add-ins in tabs on the Today screen. I thought the problem may have been "Weather" so disabled that but the problem has not gone away.

I notified SPB and they advise they are working on it.

Regards to all.

[Darius Wey]

I did a bit of testing over the weekend with my X50v running WM2003SE. Originally, I pinpointed Pocket Plus as the culprit, and my stance on that hasn't changed. Weeks ago, I notified the Spb team and as of now, they're identifying the problem and working on an update. For now, I still have Pocket Plus installed (for its task manager) but I have taken the Today plugin off my Today screen, thus leaving Spb Weather, Spb Diary and Spb Finance.

Anyway, over the days, I disabled each plugin and noticed that it wasn't one particular application that was causing the leak. Rather, it was a combination of all three. Each one would take up a couple of MB - nothing new there as that can be expected from any Today plugin, but progressively throughout the day, each one would consume maybe a couple MB more, bringing available system memory to an all-time low. With each application working on its own, it's not a problem, but when you have all the applications working together, it's a real kick in the backside.

It's not something I'm too worried about. With Pocket Plus on the Today screen, I used to experience leaks a couple of times a day, but with just the other three applications running, I might experience a leak once every few days, which all up, can be solved by a simple soft-reset. At any rate, I've notified the Spb development team of the Pocket Plus memory leak which I and a lot of other people have experienced, and they should be looking into the other applications as well since they're all integrated. If I have some time over the next couple of weeks, I'll test these exact same plugins under a WM2003 and WM5 environment, and let you know what I find out.

[Clinton Fitch]

Interesting find Darius and thanks for posting on this.

Personally I'm still going to stick with the problem being Finance. Over the weekend I too did testing with Pocket Plus, Diary, Weather and Finance. When I loaded up Pocket Plus, Diary and Weather, I experienced no memory leaks. I tested this both various combinations of Today plug-ins as well thinking that a certain combination would be the culprit. Unfortunately I didn't find such a combination as you did.

That said, once I loaded up Finance, memory just poured away as it had done before. I tried both the combination of the Pocket Plus today plug-in enabled and disabled with Finance and saw the same behavior. Further i tried enabling and disabling the Finance today plug-in and noted a significant drop in the leak with it turned off but still leaking.

While we are pointing fingers at different applications, both of us are seeing the same problem related around the same application set. Clearly something or a combination of something is causing the leak.

I really appreciate your time and effort on this Darius.

A thought just occurred to me: Do you think that the severety of the leak I'm seeing could be related to the hardware/OEM load that I'm using? I'm currently using a ViewSonic V36 (Dell x50v is being ordered today! :D )

[Darius Wey]

A thought just occurred to me: Do you think that the severety of the leak I'm seeing could be related to the hardware/OEM load that I'm using? I'm currently using a ViewSonic V36 (Dell x50v is being ordered today! :D )

Hard to say. I was under the initial assumption that this was a problem plaguing VGA devices - purely because of the additional memory requirements associated with rendering Today plugins on a high-res device. When a few others informed me that they were experiencing the same issues on their QVGA device, I quickly disregarded my initial thought.

To put things in perspective, when I was beta testing Spb Finance, Spb Weather, Spb Pocket Plus and Spb Diary on my h1940 a few months ago, I never experienced any leaks. When I installed the final releases on my X50v, I experienced the leaks. Because of this, it's hard to say whether this problem is device-related or build-related, but I plan on exploring this issue further over the next few weeks when I have a bit of time up my sleeve.

[Clinton Fitch]

Sounds like a plan. Thanks for posting once again on this.

[Gelo]

Hi guys,

I've noticed memory leak with SPB Finance 3 if enabled on today screen. I don't have PocketPlus installed so can't blame it. It does look to me that it "leaks" more when cradled but I'll need to check this.

Oleg

[Darius Wey]

Anyone experiencing slowdowns may want to keep an eye on this thread: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=363231#363231

Notably, v2.1 of Spb Finance has been released - and it has fixes for memory issues which a few of you have been encountering.

[Clinton Fitch]

Anyone experiencing slowdowns may want to keep an eye on this thread: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=363231#363231

Notably, v2.1 of Spb Finance has been released - and it has fixes for memory issues which a few of you have been encountering.

I've been using 2.1 since last week and it has substantially improved in memory performance.