IE9 causing gadgets to eat a ton of RAM?

MacLeod

MacLeod

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Ive been running the All CPU meter and GPU Observer for several months and my rig always sat around 1-1.3 GB memory being used. Last couple days, Ive notice up to 3.5 GB being used! I pull up the resource monitor and sidebar.exe is using it all. Earlier to day it alone was using 1.7 GB!

I look it up and find out all it does is handle gadgets, so I shut em down and sure enough, sidebar.exe drops off and the 1.7GB is returned.

When I re-boot or restart the gadgets, they always start up running a normal 50 MB or so but after a few hours its starts climbing and after a day its in the GB range again.

I did some more Googling and Ive found a couple instances where people are reporting this happening after they installed IE9 RC, which is exactly what happened to me, and that its a Windows 7 issue with memory leaks. This started happening about a day after I installed it.

Easy fix is to keep my gadgets shut down but I really like having my CPU and RAM monitor up there not to mention my GPU temp monitor as well. I guess I can just keep SpeedFan open all the time or HWMonitor but Id like to find a fix to this.

Anybody else notice this?
 
Gym Rat said:
Ive been running the All CPU meter and GPU Observer for several months and my rig always sat around 1-1.3 GB memory being used. Last couple days, Ive notice up to 3.5 GB being used! I pull up the resource monitor and sidebar.exe is using it all. Earlier to day it alone was using 1.7 GB!

I look it up and find out all it does is handle gadgets, so I shut em down and sure enough, sidebar.exe drops off and the 1.7GB is returned.

When I re-boot or restart the gadgets, they always start up running a normal 50 MB or so but after a few hours its starts climbing and after a day its in the GB range again.

I did some more Googling and Ive found a couple instances where people are reporting this happening after they installed IE9 RC, which is exactly what happened to me, and that its a Windows 7 issue with memory leaks. This started happening about a day after I installed it.

Easy fix is to keep my gadgets shut down but I really like having my CPU and RAM monitor up there not to mention my GPU temp monitor as well. I guess I can just keep SpeedFan open all the time or HWMonitor but Id like to find a fix to this.

Anybody else notice this?
Click to expand...

Yeah, same here with IE9RC. Read quite a bit about it around the 'net and apparently a pretty good memory leak going on. There is supposed to be a newer version of All CPU Meter that works better. Sidebar.exe just tended to use a lot of memory either way so I just shut the whole thing off and quit using the 2-3 gadgets I was using. Maybe there will be a fix sometime in the future.

Having (painfully) just got SP1 up and running want to check and see if the memory leak is still as bad as before--don't know if it's W7 or IE9 that is so much responsible. Thanks for reminding me to check out sidebar.exe for any improvements with the SP--knew there was something I was forgetting.
 
I installed SP1 yesterday after the 1.7 GB fiasco and at first, sidebar was at 45 MB but 2 hours later I was at 300 at which point I decided I'll just keep Task Manager and HWMonitor open and use them til somebody at Microsoft figures this out. Not the end of the world but it just annoys the crap out of me when my beloved rig ain't working right.
 
So dumping IE9 does get rid of the leaks? I was gonna try that tonight when I got home but I actually like IE9 and didnt really want to get rid of it. Guess Ill have to decide what I like more - IE9 or my gadgets. :D

Hard to believe a browser could be making gadgets go haywire. It's like buying new tires and they make your head lights stop working. Weird.
 
So I uninstalled IE9 when I got home and put IE8 back on there and so far so good. Im holding at 1200 MB used and sidebar.exe is holding around 70 so looks like this might have fixed the problem.
 
Gym Rat said:
So dumping IE9 does get rid of the leaks? I was gonna try that tonight when I got home but I actually like IE9 and didnt really want to get rid of it. Guess Ill have to decide what I like more - IE9 or my gadgets. :D

Hard to believe a browser could be making gadgets go haywire. It's like buying new tires and they make your head lights stop working. Weird.
Click to expand...
All gadgets are written in HTML and are essentially hosted IE pages.
 
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