Virtual & Physical memory clogged by wingate awaitng red

[dataking]

greetings,

a problem that i never experienced before, but started experiencing after i upgraded to 5.0.8 a couple of days back:

whenever the dialup connection was dropped, the server gradually slowed down to a crawl, and within a minute so slow that there was pauses within the digits while dialing out through the modem as well!..needless to say all clients lost contact with the server when this happened....

the problem was investigated and it was found that Wingate.exe was taking up ALL available memory(physical and virtual) the moment the dialup connection was dropped. (mind you this was around 400megs of RAM and about 800megs of virtual memory!!)

tried reverting back to 5.0.7 and still no go...same thing....virtual and physical memory spiked the moment the connection was dropped, but staretd returning to normal if a connection was reestablished quick enough.....ie within a minute....otherwise the only way out is to kill the wingate service and restart the machine....

tried reinstalling windows, and started with a fresh slate with 5.0.8...still exactly the same situation.....now back on 5.0.7 and praying the isp doesnt disconnect me!....problem presists...

any help would be greatly appriciated!

regards,

Shayan
Network Admin.
HavenNet distributions

server config : p3-800, 512MB ram, 20gig HDD. connection : 56k modem

[adrien]

Hi

we had some issues with 5.0.8, and also 5.0.9, which is why we release 5.0.10 yesterday, I would recommend you download and try this one.

[dataking]

Greetings,
its me again!....same problem as depicted earlier : all available physical memory and virtual memory us utilized to the max by wingate.exe under task manager. thought it was the upgrade problem, so did a clean install of windows XP this time with all latest patches, and wingate 5.0.10 a few hours back...it worked fine for a few hours..then when it disconnected, same thing happened : system crawled down to almost a halt, with only 4k of RAM and 2MB of swap space available...even the modem was dialing out in parts!....exactly the same as before....anyway...the only solution i can come up with is to stop the wingate engine every time the system disconnects and put it back on when i have manually reconnected....when on auto redial, if the system doesnt reconnect within 10 seconds, the memory starts getting gobbled up, within 30 seconds after that more than 230megs in RAM and 900MEGS in vistual memory are devoured by Wingate.exe, as seen under Talk Manager. tried reverting back to older versions of wingate, but i guess once the wingate 5.0.10 drivers are it they cannot be over written or something, a reinstall would take too long a time.....im hoping it wont come to that....


i just need to know why this is happening.....and if theres a fix available for any problem such as this!...

thank you again for your time and best regards,

Shayan

P.S.

i can send you my configuration reg file if you wish so u can examine it in detail, maybe i miscondigured some little bit somewhere..although i have gone through all the configurations and the file also with a fine thoothed comb..but to no avail....any help would be greatly appriciated.


ADDENDUM:
the only way to clean up the memory and get the system to usable state againis to shut down the wingate service(engine), this is only possible at an early stage, as in within the first minute of disconnection, OR simply reboot the system. stress on reboot and not restart,m because software is barely responding by this stage!!!

ADDENDUM2:
it also worth noting that i restore my configuration from my rgistry backup(by usig the backup wingate configuration under the advanced options in wingate) every time i reinstall the product, for obvious reasons!i dont want to sit and reconfigure the entire system from scratch again! i hvae IP reservations to MAC addresses in place, it would be almost impossible to get all that from my users again!! the current size of the registry backup for wingate configuration is 224Kbytes.

also it would help if you could tell me how to remove ALL traces of wingate 5.0.10 from my system so i can revert to my 5.0.7...which was serving me very well!!!

[adrien]

OK, I will have a look at this.

To go back to WInGate 5.0.7, the only changes were the EXE files and the driver, so you should be able to just uninstall and install 5.0.7

Adrien

[dataking]

greetings!...

i come to you now with a solution and a probable cause for the problem, all i ask of you now is WHY this happens....

upon further scrutiny, and detailed logging of every action the system takes while the connection is not present, i hvae come to a conclusion that the microsoft patch KB823980-x86-ENU is what causes wingate to lock up and start chunking up on memory!!! i dont know why it does this, but upon installation of this patch it starts misbehaving...upon removal of the said patch it works like a charm! this was the same patch i installed in windows XP as well...after which it started clogging up....i do not believe theres anything else inked to this issue, unless you can shed some more light on this....which i would really be grateful for!!


this was the blaster patch issued by microsoft, i do not know why it does this but i have to rely on my firewall now to keep the worm out!!....although i did find an alternate patch on microsoft's site which address the dcom issue, but i want to know why wingate cant work with the afore mentioned patch?!!!!

thanks again for your time!...

regards,

Shayan

[adrien]

Hey, thanks heaps for this!

Must have taken you ages to isolate that one!

It is possible that MS broke something with that patch that makes the OS leak network buffers when used with WinGate, we will do some testing with and without it here, to see if we can work around it in our driver.

Thanks again

Adrien

[dataking]

Greetings yet once again!

youre most welcome adrien, anyting to help sort out issues with the easiest and most stable proxy server out there!!!

a few more points of interest : the version i finally installed and got running without a hitch was 5.0.7, because this is what i KNOW was running flawlessly before the screwups started to happen!....didnt want to take the chance with 5.0.8+, dont know how stable they are!

oh and it took me about 5 hours straight to pinpoint the bugger......


been about 12 hours since the last check, servers humming away smoothly....even tried disconnecting a few times...gets back up and running in no time!..and no memory leaks either!....

hence it is confirmed its the dcom patch which was the cause of this all!....


regards,

Shayan