Memory Leak diagnoses

There are a number of counters in the memory category that you can use to spot poor performance that may be caused by insufficient RAM. Here are some of those counters:

PAGES/SEC – this value counts the number of times per second that the computer must access virtual memory rather than physical memory. A value above 20 is considered to be problematic, but it may indicate a problem with the way that your virtual memory is configured rather than a problem with the physical memory.

Committed Bytes and Available Bytes – The Committed Bytes counter traces the amount of virtual memory that’s in use. The Available Bytes counter monitors how much memory is actually available. As you might expect, as the Available Bytes counter decreases, paging increases, thus slowing down your machine. If you determine that the Available Bytes are often in short supply, you can correct the problem by adding memory. However, before you do, try watching both counters together as you open and close programs. If the committed bytes don’t decrease and available bytes don’t increase as you close programs, the system may have a memory leak which is caused by a software problem rather than insufficient RAM.

Pool Nonpaged Bytes and Pool Nonpaged Allocs – Another way to test for memory leaks is to watch these two counters. The Pool Nonpaged Bytes counter counts pages of memory that can’t be moved to virtual memory, but must stay in the physical RAM.  Normally, if this value is too high, you’ll have to add more memory. However, you can watch the Pool Nonpaged Allocs counter to see just how many calls are being made to that portion of the memory. If the number of calls don’t seem to correspond with the number of memory pages, you may have a memory leak rather than insufficient memory.

Cache Bytes – This counter monitors the amount of memory being used for the file system cache. Anything over 4 MB is considered to be to much. The solution is to add more memory.