WinGate 8.2.5 Causing Windows Crashes

[agroda]

I'm having an issue with the newest version of Wingate, 8.2.5. It seems that when I have this version installed, I see the operating system rebooting constantly. I can also see that there is very high CPU and memory usage. I am in a virtual environment, ESX 5.1 with vmx-09 virtual hardware. I first saw this on Windows Server 2008 R2. After investigating everything, I figured the OS was faulty, so I just created a new VM on Server 2012 R2. I noticed very similar behavior, the CPU maxes out, memory is maxed, and instead of rebooting, I see the network card come offline until I force reboot the VM. So it almost appears to be something with the actual network driver. I also used RAMmap to see what was consuming all of the memory, and it showed over 3GB in a private driver, but didn't tell me what. When I remove Wingate, my memory percentage goes from 97% to around 22%.

I'm not sure if this is an isolated issue, it's hard to believe that this version was released almost 2 months ago and I don't see anyone talking about this. However since I am seeing similar behavior on two different clean installs, I'm thinking something is wrong. Maybe I should install without the Wingate network driver? I have installed this, but don't use VPN or NAT. I have backed down to version 8.2.1 for now.

[adrien]

Hi

so it works fine on 8.2.1 and you're seeing these problems only on 8.2.5?

That's very unexpected. We didn't change anything with the driver between those 2 versions. Which user database are you using?

We haven't had any other reports of this.

What was the name of the private driver that was using 3GB?

Regards

Adrien

[agroda]

I'm still troubleshooting to see what else I can find out. It seems on 2012 Server the behavior is different and affects both 8.2.1 and 8.2.5. Instead of flooding out the memory and forcing VM to reboot, it now just locks up the network card where it can't communicate and I have to force a reboot.

Unfortunately I could not get the name of the driver, just saw that it was "Private Driver" and I assumed. It appears there might be more going on here, although this is a brand new VM with only Wingate on it. Something is strange...I'll see what else I can find out.

[adrien]

Hi

there are known issues running in VM, especially when logging to a remote / network drive (e.g. SAN).

We added log write caching into Wingate itself to get around these issues, but it's not on by default.

Are you running the image off a network drive / SAN?

Adrien

[agroda]

Yes, the VM is running on a SAN. So far it's been OK for the past couple of days, however I think we want to enable this. How do I go about enabling log write caching?

[adrien]

It's just a setting for each logger. So go to WinGate > Control Panel > Logging, choose log files tab. Then in the top left pane double click each logger, and select the bottom checkbox.

Regards

Adrien