Increasing windows desktop heap (xp)

[quadz]

Not sure to what degree this applies to Vista, or Win 7.

But I like to run lots of applications, and XP frustratingly runs out of 'resources' too quickly, so that I can't open as many apps as I want.  (I don't run win2k anymore, but it used to have the same problem.)

Annoyingly, it never helped to add more RAM to the system.  The system could have plenty of free RAM, and yet run into a limit that would prevent more applictions or windows from being opened.

Here's a technical explanation:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ntdebugging/archive/2007/01/04/desktop-heap-overview.aspx

Last night, I increased the SessionViewSize maximum from 48MB to 96MB, and increased the csrss.exe SharedSection desktop heap from 3072 to 32768.

I also increased the per-process GDIProcessHandleQuota and USERProcessHandleQuota from 10000 to 16000.  These I mostly increased just for the hell of it, as I don't tend to have a single process that ever tries to allocate more than 10000 GDI or USER handles, anyway.

The main thing is the desktop heap.

After rebooting, I have so far been able to launch as many concurrent applications as I feel like, without problems.

With luck, this has solved a problem that has been practically a daily annoyance to me for years.

[QwazyWabbit]

Wow, you must really have a lot of apps open or one of them is a big fat resource hog. I thought I was bad with 17 applications and 57 processes. I ran dheapmon and only had 39% usage of WinSta0 heap. Perfmon says my handle count total is about 13,600 but I have never seen a resource problem in XP, I have bumped the pagefile size limit a couple of times.

Are you running all the tastyspleen servers on your desktop?

[quadz]

Wow, you must really have a lot of apps open or one of them is a big fat resource hog. I thought I was bad with 17 applications and 57 processes. I ran dheapmon and only had 39% usage of WinSta0 heap.

There seem to be a couple factors... lots of apps, and also leaky apps (including the desktop explorer.exe)

I tend to go 50 or 60 days between reboots...  and XP just gets more and more resource starved over time.

I would end up having to force-quit the desktop explorer.exe process, just to reclaim some of its leaked handles... but that sucked, because I lose the arrangement of my applications on the taskbar (which I purposely open in a certain order so that they are in known locations so i can sort of use muscle memory to find them rather than hunting for them.)

No single app tends to be an exterme hog... The big ones have been firefox, iTunes, visual studio (which I run several instances of)... as well as msimn.exe (outlook express) which leaks handles like a seive.  (Fortunately OE is simple to quit and restart, so, i didn't really care about that much, just restarted it every day.)

As an aside - I upgraded iTunes a couple days ago from 8.x to 9.x ... and much to my surprise, the new version uses about 4.6 times fewer GDI handles than the old iTunes used to.  It used to use around 1800, now it's 390.  I would never have expected that sort of improvement, but I'm happy to see it.

Currently I have 80 processes and 31 "applications" (although, really, some of those applications are root-level windows belonging to a single process, like firefox.exe (7) or explorer.exe (3).)

But over time, that will end up more like firefox.exe (21) and explorer.exe (13) ... as well as numerous cmd.exe instances, and telnet and ssh instances, etc...

Are you running all the tastyspleen servers on your desktop?

Haha, noooo.  All leeenux.

(Although I do telnet to their admin consoles from here.)

[RRBM [NL]]

In xp i use Cleanmem http://www.pcwintech.com/node/145 for memory leaks. Works fine for me.