Sluggish / thrashing

[Guest]

More than once, Retrospect Workgroup has become sluggish and cause the hard drive to thrash endlessly. There is 128Meg Ram on this computer (Windows 98 SE) hooked up to a SCSI Onstream tape drive (a supported drive). This, of course, leads to other program failures, such as the error message below:

 

 

 

Runtime error in WULOADER.EXE, R6028 - unable to initialize heap

 

 

 

Sometimes recovery is possible, by painstakingly closing windows and restarting, but usually a hard reboot is required once it hard locks. (Which it has also done). There are no screen savers running, and this is the only software of note that runs on this computer, a Celeron 700Mhz.

 

 

 

I've left the Resource Meter program running to see if it's an overall memory problem - it is not, as more than 75% of resources are free when this occurs. It is consistent with some sort of memory leak. Has anyone else come across similar symptoms?

 

 

 

The backups are usually fine except for the last one attempted, but the logs are then lost, so the report program cannot generate a valid report.

 

 

 

Richard

[lv2ski]

Don't forget that Windows 98 will not use more then 64 MB of ram efficiently

 

unless you make a registry change:

 

 

 

Windows 98 accesses your swap file (virtual memory) before it runs out of RAM (physical memory). Virtual memory will always operate slower than physical memory, so why does Windows 98 insist on using both? According to article Q223294 in the Microsoft knowledge base, this new method is more efficient. In your SYSTEM.INI file, under the [386Enh] section, add this line:

 

ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

 

Reboot.

 

 

 

See if that helps.

 

 

[Guest]

Just checked the RAM and it's actually 64 Meg Ram, not 128 as mentioned. Would that registry change help any way? I have just now changed the swap file to 128M minimum size, on the secondary hard drive to see if that helps.

[lv2ski]

With 64...then no. No need for this fix that I mentioned.

[Guest]

I changed the virtual memory to increase the swap file and place on drive D: instead of C:. However, this morning the symptom repeated: memory resources were not depleted, yet on the backup server the hard drive was thrashing, and performance extremely sluggish, requiring a reboot.

 

 

 

A backup of 11 gig normally takes 3 hours, but 3 gig took 7 hours and hit the scheduled stop time. This occurred during the backup of a Retrospect client (I have some being backed up through UNC shares).

 

 

 

I am nearing the end of my 30 day initial support, does this qualify as "free installation and set-up support", or must I purchase an Incident support?

[lv2ski]

This qualifies as a free incident before your 30 days is up.

[Guest]

I spoke with tech support and found that 64 MB was minimum requirements for Retrospect so I've moved 128 MB from another computer to bring it up to 192 MB. I did a memory analysis which discovered that 50 MB was used just to display all the exception log windows that appeared after all computers were compared. If there were more computers to back up or more errors, that could easily double which could lead to heavy swap file usage. Now that I've done so, I'll also implement your recommended ConservativeSwapfileUsage change.

 

 

 

He also recommended some other troubleshooting methods such as hooking up a computer using a cross-over network cable, which I may do, but I'm on vacation next week, and that'd be too much to explain to the backup operator...

 

 

 

Richard

[Guest]

Word to the wise if you use ConservativeSwapfileUsage:

 

 

 

Make sure your PagingDrive in the [386Enh] section is set to C: (or your boot drive). I had it set to D: and it would not boot, just sat on the start up screen with the hard drive thrashing ... Once I changed to C: it booted up right away..