wingate.exe service eating up all memory

[wyldcyde]

Hi there,
we have a problem that happens every few months (it seems).
wingate running on our NT server starts to use up all available memory. The wingate.exe process tries to use all available memory (eg. 320mb).
Obviously this causes whole server to grind to a halt. (VERY slow response times).
After awhile, no one can login to wingate and I cannot get into gatekeeper.
Trying to stop the wingate service doesn't work either, so I have to go into windows NT service manager and set wingate service to manual start or disabled, then restart the server computer and re-install wingate.
Even if I delete all the files in wingate directory and reinstall wingate5.2, i still get the same problem after awhile.

Initially the problem began while we were on wingate5.1, so i thought it was a bug in that version so i upgraded to 5.2 but problem still persists.
Wingate runs for awhile (5hours), but eventually eats up all memory and becomes unusable.
As far as I am aware, no configuration changes have been made to wingate that would cause this problem.
I would do full uninstall then install but we have large user database that would be lost/reset if i did that.
I'm thinking of deleting all registry keys except for user database then installing wingate5.2
Is it possible that the wingate service has become corrupted?

Eli

[mmakowski57]

Are you by chance using the Kaspersky 1.1 plug-in? It had some serious memory leak problems. Caused Wingate.exe to grow rapidly on my system. The new 1.2.1 plug-in corrected the problem for me. My system has been been running for days now with no operator intervention.

I also discovered that I had to manually remove all entries in the "Data Scanning" section of the registry and then reinstall Wingate and Kaspersky plug-in. Seems as though the new plug-in and/or Wingate 5.2 also causes a few problem with BSOD's and the like if there is any sign of the the old Visnetic AV plug-in hanging around. Simply uninstalling the Visnetic plug-in did not remove all of the entries. This problem has happened to me twice on two separate installations. Wingate really does not like the old Visnetic plug-in - at least for me.

Perhaps this will help.

Mike M.

Hi there,
we have a problem that happens every few months (it seems).
wingate running on our NT server starts to use up all available memory. The wingate.exe process tries to use all available memory (eg. 320mb).
Obviously this causes whole server to grind to a halt. (VERY slow response times).
After awhile, no one can login to wingate and I cannot get into gatekeeper.
Trying to stop the wingate service doesn't work either, so I have to go into windows NT service manager and set wingate service to manual start or disabled, then restart the server computer and re-install wingate.
Even if I delete all the files in wingate directory and reinstall wingate5.2, i still get the same problem after awhile.

Initially the problem began while we were on wingate5.1, so i thought it was a bug in that version so i upgraded to 5.2 but problem still persists.
Wingate runs for awhile (5hours), but eventually eats up all memory and becomes unusable.
As far as I am aware, no configuration changes have been made to wingate that would cause this problem.
I would do full uninstall then install but we have large user database that would be lost/reset if i did that.
I'm thinking of deleting all registry keys except for user database then installing wingate5.2
Is it possible that the wingate service has become corrupted?

Eli

[wyldcyde]

Thanks mate. this memory problem occured a long time ago when we were using version 4.something ...
i've now tried going back to version 5.0.10
whatever the problem is, its started happening on 5.1 & 5.2.
if running on 5.0.10 works then i'll wait until a newer version of wingate comes out before upgrading.
i'll checkout those registry setttings you mentioned.
i'm not running any plugins.
THANKS, i appreciate such a quick reply.
I'm REALLY tired today so this wingate problem is driving me nutz.

Eli

[wyldcyde]

ok, things seemed to have calmed down now that i'm back on wingate 5.0.10
i'll be moitoring the memory usage to see if wingate goes postal again.

Eli

[VreebieS]

Hmm.. I wonder if the Free-RAM Software might work..
Try FreeRamXP freeware from 'yourwaresolutions'. And pls post your result.

[Jason Dax]

I have the same problem a long ago. I found that, when running WG 5.x in a NT environment, the .DBX an .CDX files grow to a point of eat the memory.

Why, I don't know. It work fine for a couple of weeks, sometimes a mont or two, but finally came to the same.

Just shut down WG, delete this two files, and start WG again. This will solve the problem

In my case, when this files reach only 2MB, start the problem.

Just try, maybe this will solve your problems too.

Regards

[ngrayson]

I had/have a similar issue but under windows 98 and several versionso fo wingate. Although this is not a fix it may be of interest to help understand.

I Set the system utility to log allocated memory, locked memory & free memory every 10s and log to file. I left this running overnight when there were no users on the system and only this machine was running. This generates a CSV file which I imported into Excel.

System monitor does not time stamp so I inserted a blank column A and set the cell formats to time "hh:mm:ss". I set cell A1 to be the file creation time and then A2 to be A1+timevalue("00:00:10") and copied this to the whole of column A. This now gives you roughly timestamped events.

You may see that the Allocated memory Stair cases upwards (and if you subtract the cells, its multiples of 4096 bytes).

When I then went through the logs (each of which has Debugging enabled), these events were within seconds of an event in the WINS log.

System monitor does not exist on NT but I suspect the computer performance does the same.

If you have an idle 10 Minutes it would be intersting to know if its the same mechanism.

[wyldcyde]

Thanks guys for all your help & suggestions.
Everything is fine now after going back to version 5.0.10.
It would have been nice to spend time trying to narrow down the exact issue/cause but there are many people here who rely on internet being up 24/7/365... I can only keep users off my back for a short while.
It is strange though, because 5.1 worked fine for a few days/weeks then suddenly went haywire. Maybe that dbf cdx thing has something todo with it.
I've just started up wingate after restarting sever:
history.cdx = 1mb
history.dbf = 42mb

i dont really use the history section when checking logs or activity so turning it off won't be a problem.

I'm going on holiday for a few days soon so i will switch history logging off. If i come back and everything is a mess then i'll just redump the server from ghost file.

Eli