[8525, TyTN, MDA Vario II, JasJam ROM Development] JoeSchmoe22:
WM6 memory leak on Sprint Mogul

I recently purchased a Sprint Mogul and upgraded to the latest ROM that HTC put out on their site on 3/10/08. I have installed many programs but only 3 launch at startup which are iLock2 [screen lock], TouchPal [a thumbable keyboard] and Microsoft's own Voice Command v 1.6. Voice Command is the largest user of memory, approx. 2.3 MB. TouchPal uses about 990 kb and iLock uses less than 35 kb. After about 1 hour I'm down to 11 MB of free memory and I didn't do anything or run a single thing on my device. If I try to launch PIE or Media Player, forget it, there's so little RAM left that it freezes in about 15 minutes of usage. So, if I want to use either of these, I have to do so immediately after a soft reset.

Based on my observations above and testing below, WM6 OS has a memory leak!

To make sure I give WM6 a fair chance, I had to measure the memory immediately after a Hard Rest. So that's exactly what I did 3 times and here are my findings:

Test #1...................FREE RAM IMMEDIATE...........FREE RAM IN 1 HOUR

Hard Reset #1...................24.15 MB...........................19.98 MB

Hard Reset #2...................24.15 MB...........................20.02 MB

Hard Reset #3...................24.14 MB...........................19.96 MB

Bottom line, I'm losing memory for no reason. I have not loaded any of my own programs AND I did not allow the Sprint bloatware to be installed either by doing a soft reset before the 3 second countdown.

Now the memory loss from Test #1 might not seem huge, but after loading my programs and PIM data the difference was even more dramatic, see Test #2. [FYI, I took the "IMMEDIATE" measurements in Test #1 and #2 as soon as the computer would allow me to access the memory console. Not perfect science, but close.]

Test #2......................FREE RAM IMMEDIATE........FREE RAM IN 20 MINS

Soft Reset #1.....................21.37 MB............................13.69 MB

Soft Reset #2.....................21.45 MB............................13.35 MB

Soft Reset #3.....................21.46 MB............................13.44 MB

Finally, to eliminate some rogue process eating all of my memory, I measured the process growth. I was able to do so after each soft reset by using Task Manager v.2.9, which I installed. A few of them grew in size, not sure why, but they did, so below is a sample of their growth. [I actually did this several times and the numbers below are representative of what I found in each of the trials.]

Test #3...................IMMEDIATE.................20 MINS

device.exe..................2682 kb...................2696 kb

cprog.exe...................1749 kb...................2024 kb

gwes.exe....................1559 kb...................1666 kb

filesys.exe..................1538 kb...................1751 kb

While the processes grew, it wasn't significant enough to offset the loss in memory illustrated in Test #2. I also watched the processes associated with my 3 programs that launched at startup and the other OS processes, 15 in all. Some of those grew ever so slightly as well. But in aggregate, the growth for all 15 processes from the time immediately following the reset to 20 minutes later only accounted for 855 kb while I saw my memory drop on average 8 MB.

What could be happening?

I believe the OS is loading something into memory [RAM checker, scanner, cleaner, etc.] that I can't see in the processes or application window and after it's done, it is not releasing the memory, ergo a memory leak.

Thoughts?