0

My windows 7 installation started having a memory leak where after a few days memory usage slowly creeps up to 90% (of 16 gb).

In my task manager, the list of processes don't add up to that much memory, so I downloaded rammap and saw a bunch of bash.exe and sed.exe processes.

Each of these use up 4K. I uninstalled cygwin, but this is still happening:

enter image description here

Edit: Some more information: They do not come back immediately after a restart. However, after some more time memory usage starts going up again and I check RAMMAP and the weird processes are there again.

I don't have cygwin installed anymore, so it's curious where these are even coming from

1
  • I'm guessing the processes come back after a reboot?
    – Steven
    Aug 7, 2015 at 17:12

3 Answers 3

1
+100

Use Process Explorer to find out from which folder these processes are coming from and what are their parameters by double-click on the process to display its properties.

The folder-name will identify the installed product that is responsible for these processes, and the parameters may indicate for what purpose.

image

2
  • Thanks for the suggestion! I just downloaded process explorer and unfortunately it doesn't show any of the "bash.exe" in there. I opened RamMap and still seeing those processes though. Aug 10, 2015 at 0:46
  • Ah was able to finally find bash.exe in process explorer and saw that it was coming from Prey.exe. I uninstalled this program and it hasn't happened since then. Thanks! Aug 10, 2015 at 22:01
0

You have hardly provided enough information, but assuming these processes start up again after a reboot, you could probably prevent them from starting by using msconfig.

  1. Win+R, and type in msconfig, and press Enter
  2. Click Yes if asked whether to run the program (Don't we all love UAC?)
  3. Go to the Startup tab
  4. Now comes the tricky part. Carefully look at each item (you may need to expand the window to see all the information), and if it starts anything that appears related to Cygwin, bash.exe, sed.exe, whatever, disable it.
  5. Reboot
  6. If your problem comes back, you can check msconfig again and see if you missed anything.

You can probably disable most of the Startup items safely, and if something quits working after you reboot, go back into msconfig and enable some of the things you disabled. Really, it isn't hard. :)

0

The reason of the problem seems a bug in a Windows 7 update delivered this summer. After installing this update, any process leaves 20 KB occupied. This seems not much, but when processes are called many times repeatedly, it can sum up to several GB (in my case, it's a build prcedure which calls hundreds of thousands of make.exe, bash.exe, sed.exe, sh.exe, g++.exe, cc1plus.exe etc. which adds ca. 8 GB to memory usage every night).

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .