arnstein Posted November 11, 2003 Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 My environment is Dantz Retrospect Professional 6.5.336 Windows 2000 service pack 4 Dell Dimension XPS (Pentium 4, 512 MBytes of memory, 1 GByte swap file). Ecrix VXA-1 SCSI tape drive I don't do any remote backups. And yes Nate, I disabled my tape drive in Windows Device Manager. My problem occurs when a backup job takes a long time, like several hours. My computer runs out of memory, and locks up. Using Windows 2000 scheduling and MKS Toolkit, I am able to collect some troubling statistics. I see is that retrospect.exe uses up to 188 MBytes of virtual memory. I use the MKS Toolkit "ps" command to determine this. This in itself isn't too bad, since I have 1.5 GBytes of virtual memory total. What kills my computer is that physical memory is exhausted. Not virtual memory, but physical memory. According to the MKS toolkit "sysinf" command, I'm down to less than 5 MBytes of physical memory. Then the computer locks up, and no further statistics can be collected. I suspect that some of the recent backup failures reported in this forum are due to this memory problem. Is there any way to tell retrospect to stop using so much physical memory? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 11, 2003 Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 Hi What is Retrospect doing at that time? Just writing data to tape or building a snapshot? How many operations do you have running at once? Does the memory useage seem to suddently spike or gradually increase as the backup runs? Are you using open file backup? Thanks Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arnstein Posted November 11, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 Quote: natew said: What is Retrospect doing at that time? Just writing data to tape or building a snapshot? How many operations do you have running at once? Does the memory useage seem to suddently spike or gradually increase as the backup runs? Are you using open file backup? Nate, I don't know if retrospect.exe is writing to tape or building a snapshot. I only have one operation going at a time, since my Retrospect license is restricted to one execution. I do my backups when my computer is idle, with no one logged in. The memory usage gradually increases. The longer retrospect.exe runs, the more likely it is to cause a computer crash. Yes, my Retrospect scripts enable open file backup. HOWEVER, I don't actually succeed in backing up open files, because this is only possible under Windows XP (according to all my log files). By the way Nate, I just got a message that advised me that some Norton/Symantec software products can cause these memory problems. I am using Norton Internet Secutiry 2004, which includes antivirus and firewall. What do you think? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
natew Posted November 11, 2003 Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 Hi It sure sounds like a memory leak to me. I don't know of any current leaks on Retrospect though. Can you try shutting of the symantec stuff just long enough to monitor a backup? I wonder if the Antivirus scan software is trying to monitor the disk activity during the backup? That could burn up your available memory in a hurry. Nate Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arnstein Posted November 11, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 Quote: natew said: Can you try shutting of the symantec stuff just long enough to monitor a backup? I'll work on this. Symantec doesn't make it easy though. First, I find that I can disable Norton Antivirus "auto protect" by right-clicking its system tray icon. However, this feature somehow re-enabled itself without my intervention! Twice! Second, Symantec now uses product activation with its products. Therefore, I will have to seek help from Symantec before I uninstall their software. I don't want to get into a situation where I lose my rights to install their software. This might take some time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awnews Posted November 11, 2003 Report Share Posted November 11, 2003 Did you by chance run Norton checkup? As part of this process Norton asks you to fix all the things that are "wrong" with the system (registry, shortcuts, etc.) and this *includes* not having Auto-Protect turned on. So if you don't catch this, AP will be turned back on if you click on the Fix Everything option. You can manually disable the AP "fix" before clicking on the "Fix Everything" button to prevent AP from being turned back on. > disable Norton Antivirus "auto protect" by right-clicking its system tray icon. However, this feature somehow re-enabled itself without my intervention! Twice! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted November 12, 2003 Report Share Posted November 12, 2003 You might want to monitor your page file use when Retrospect is not running. Try running this page file monitor. I would suggest the following: 1. Reboot to cause your page file to reset. 2. Run the system for a few hours, without using Retrospect. 3. Run the page file monitor at various times to see the maximum and current usage. I have the opposire complaint, i.e., Retrospect is not using more memory. Perhaps, that is a function the file sizes and types? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arnstein Posted November 23, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 23, 2003 I think I have enough data to draw a conclusion now. When I disable the "Auto protect" feature of Norton AntiVirus, I can do long, unattended backups with Retrospect. No problem. When I leave "Auto protect" enabled, I get a failed backup and an incapacitated computer about half the time. Almost 100% of the time, I get physical memory usage 99%, according to MKS Toolkit utility sysinf. Another symptom is that various services fail and leave entries in the Windows event log like "The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the pool was empty." Wouldn't it be great if Dantz and Symantec jointly investigated this problem. I suspect that these two companies have a lot of customers in common. Both companies cater to computer users who care about protecting their data. Does anyone know how to disable the "Auto protect" feature from a command line? If so, I could use the Windows scheduler to do so when my scheduled Retrospect backup jobs run. I know this is not a Retrospect problem, but perhaps I'm not the first Retrospect user to entertain this thought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arnstein Posted November 24, 2003 Author Report Share Posted November 24, 2003 Quote: arnstein (that's me) said: I think I have enough data to draw a conclusion now. When I disable the "Auto protect" feature of Norton AntiVirus, I can do long, unattended backups with Retrospect. No problem. I guess that I spoke too soon. I just attempted another long, unattended backup, with "Auto protect" turned off. It failed. The Retrospect log said Can't save snapshot in ... , error -1019 (not enough resources) Can't access source volume, error -1019 (not enough resources) So I'm back to square one here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaikow Posted November 24, 2003 Report Share Posted November 24, 2003 Quote: arnstein said: I think I have enough data to draw a conclusion now. When I disable the "Auto protect" feature of Norton AntiVirus, I can do long, unattended backups with Retrospect. No problem. When I leave "Auto protect" enabled, I get a failed backup and an incapacitated computer about half the time. Almost 100% of the time, I get physical memory usage 99%, according to MKS Toolkit utility sysinf. Another symptom is that various services fail and leave entries in the Windows event log like "The server was unable to allocate from the system nonpaged pool because the pool was empty." Wouldn't it be great if Dantz and Symantec jointly investigated this problem. I suspect that these two companies have a lot of customers in common. Both companies cater to computer users who care about protecting their data. Does anyone know how to disable the "Auto protect" feature from a command line? If so, I could use the Windows scheduler to do so when my scheduled Retrospect backup jobs run. I know this is not a Retrospect problem, but perhaps I'm not the first Retrospect user to entertain this thought. Recently, I've been running Retrospect with NAV 2003's AutoProtect enabled. I also have Script Blocking enabled. I normally do not explicitly run any other software while REtrospect is running, other than the critters that are loaded at startup. So far, no problems, tho I have not yet tried a Recyle backup with AutoProtect enabled. Do you have the NAV Office plug-in disabled? Do you have CD recording software installed? If so, I suggest rebooting before doing the full backup. Instead pf using the MS Toolkit to examine memory usage, I would instead just use CTRL ALT DEL to use the Task Manager. And, if memory is really being gobbled up, I would suggest running the page file monitor I suggested im another post in this thread. Run it just before you run Retrospect and just after. Symantec does take into account NAV's effect on other programs. Indeed, the only reason NAV has an Office plug-in is that some time ago, it was learned that some apps will not run with NAV's AutoProtect enabled, so the Office plug-in was added to help those folkes. Otherwise, the NAV Office plug-in is not needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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