Gradually eats more memory with every defrag

[VanguardLH]

SmartDefrag 1.10

Windows XP Pro SP-3

 

I trialed SmartDefrag in a virtual machine and decided to use it on my host. I experimented with some defrags (defrag only, fast optimize, deep optimize), set it up for auto-defrag, and scheduled a deep optimize defrag for Monday mornings at 2AM (so they were before the full image backups of my disk). Looked good and all seemed well -- until I checked Task Manager to see the "IObit SmartDefrag.exe" process (yep, they foolishly put a space in the executable) and saw this process was eating around 172MB of memory. YIKES!

 

When I first load the program, it consumes 6MB of space. Not bad for a monitor program nowadays (bloated to an assembly programmer, though). So I wondered what made it eat up 172MB over just a couple hours of testing and letting it run in the background. Well, as I do successive defrags (manual or auto), the memory consumption of this process goes up. Okay, so it needs more memory when it is actually doing a defrag - but why does it need to retain this memory after the defrag has completed? It doesn't and why this type of memory leak means this utility cannot remain on my host. I'm not going to get into low memory conditions because this utility continually eats up memory and never relinquishes it after the code intensive tasks (i.e., defrags) have been completed.

 

The only reason why I considered installing this product is because of its auto-defrag feature. I can use Task Scheduler to schedule defrag.exe to run at the same times as I scheduled the deep optimize defrag by SmartDefrag; however, no matter when I configure the start time for a scheduled task, and because I want to use my host which means the task needs to wait or stop if the host isn't idle, it is highly possible that the host is busy when the scheduled time arrives for the defrag job. I can schedule it for 2AM but I am too often on my host at that time. I'm on my host at various times enough that there is no time where the host may be idle when a scheduled job is supposed to begin. So while I noticed that one partition (C:) was getting defragged at least every couple of weeks or once a month (with some of the weekly defrag jobs never starting because the host was not idle), the other partition (D:) had not been defragged since 5 months ago.

 

There are enough idle times throughout the day for a background defragmenter to work to inch its way through the process to keep the disks defragmented overall but there may not be a long enough time for a scheduled defrag job to complete or the host isn't idle at the scheduled time. So the background incremental defrag feature appealed to me - but NOT if it is going to eat up a huge chunk of memory, especially for a *monitor* utility and when there is no defrag operation in progress.

 

While I usually reserve the term "memory leak" to those programs that leave pointer allocations behind when they exit, this is an in-process memory leak where the process continually eats up more memory. Iobit is into performance utilities, SmartDefrag is supposed to be one of those, but eating up the memory is NOT a performance enhancing effect!

 

To get SmartDefrag back down to a reasonable memory footprint is to exit and reload it; however, that just starts it eating memory from scratch. I leave my host on 24x7 so the program's footprint isn't going to get reset with periodic shutdowns and reboots of the OS.

 

There isn't much progressive memory consumption (memory leak) when using the defrag-only mode only because much less additional memory is needed for that mode. There is about a 12MB jump each time a deep optimize defrag is performed, and another 12MB jump for the next deep optimize defrag, and so on. Like the old Pacman game, the process goes chomp, chomp, chomping along until, I fear, there's the downfall siren noise as Pacman gets eaten itself and the system crashes or apps won't load because of a low [free] memory condition.

 

Yes, I could not load SmartDefrag on Windows startup and just run it manually (and then exit it) to get around the gradual memory consumption but then I lose the only reason why I got this utility which was to do background and gradual defrags of my disks.

[ektorbarajas]

One of the betas had the problem of just defragmenting drive C, and leaving the other drives intact.

 

VanguardLH, by reading your post I checked smartdefrag and noticed that an autodefrag was run, and after checking the program main window it appears that just the C drives was auto defragmented !!! and this is bad! since I moved a lot of files on my D drive, and the D drive was not auto defragmented !

 

About the memory issue I also noticed that indeed smartdefrag starts eating more and more memory.

 

I have Cacheman XP to auto recover ram, and neither that way smartdefrag leaves the memory!

 

Well. I'm sorry to say the following:

 

I leaved the iobit forums for a while because the beta versions were very buggy (it's ok since it's a beta)... then I heard that an Official version (non beta) was released and decided to give another try to the program and what is my surprise !! OLD bugs or errors from beta version still present on the official version !!!

 

C'Mon guys & gals at Iobit !!! what's the deal !!! I hope my post doesn't get banned but it seems that I have to go back and use "Jkdefrag", I know it's not as automatic and easy to setup as smartdefrag, but it does a great job.

 

anyway, hope smartdefrag issues get solved and all users that are not tech savvy could be able to have a functional defragger that's easy to install and use.

 

Kind regards