Finally nailed my Windows memory leak (A.K.A. The official we hate Karl club)
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For about a month, I've had a serious memory leak on my Windows. Over time, my "commit charge" would go up into tens of gigabytes. Eventually, it would fill up all 60GB of virtual memory and cause programs to start dying.
This morning, I spent another hour reading through crappy TechNet discussions, articles etc. I finally nailed the sucker.
It's a service called RunSwUSB, apparently installed by my Realtek network card driver update. I stopped the service and...
Voila.
It installed itself directly under
C:\Windows
directory, which is a huge WTF in itself. Still have no clue what's it doing. First line in its log file (which is also underC:\Windows
):[2015/07/18](23:36:13)Run Realtek Service Application By Karl (23:36:13) -> OpenService failed, error code = 0x424 The specified service does not exist as an installed service.
Well FUCK YOU Karl. I've wasted too much time on your spyware shit.
Consider this a PSA if your system starts leaking pages all of a sudden.
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Karl, you dick.
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"Kaarl, there is a huge memory leak in our computer"
"Oh, hey, how did that get here?"
"Kaaaarl, what did you do?"
"Me? I didn't do this"
"Explain what happened Kaaaaaaarl"
"I have never seen it before in my life"
"Why did you allocate this memory, Karl?"
"I do not leak memory. That is my least favourite thing to do!"
"Tell me, Karl, exactly what you were doing before I shut down the service."
"Okay. Well, I was in @cartman82s computer"
"Okay..."
"I was sitting in his heap"
"Yes..."
"Allocating memory"
"Go on..."
"And, well, this service walked in"
"Okay..."
"So I looked him up"
"Yes..."
"And, ah... I allocated 60GB of virtual memory"
"Kaaaaaaarl, that kills computers!"Filed Under: minor changes from Llamas with hats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZUPCB9533Y
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But... what does it do?
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Probably send your datas to Realtek so they can mine them and find the bitcoins inside. Or something.
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Still have no clue what's it doing
I'd bet money that what it's supposed to be doing is keeping drivers up to date (RunSoftwareUpdateServiceBackground, would be my guess). That entire class of software is almost as riddled with as IE toolbars.
: Probably in C:\Windows to leave it free to rewrite all of C:\Program Files\Realtek. Both of which are most likely hardcoded paths.
: Thanks for the PSA. Will comb the school workstations for this beast.
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I'd bet money that what it's supposed to be doing is keeping drivers up to date (RunSoftwareUpdateServiceBackground, would be my guess). That entire class of software is almost as riddled with as IE toolbars.
If I was less lazy, I'd set up wireshark or something and see if it's phoning home. But I'm not.
: Probably in C:\Windows to leave it free to rewrite all of C:\Program Files\Realtek. Both of which are most likely hardcoded paths.
Is that how it works? If you're inside Win directory, you get special privileges?
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No. Well, only the privilege of not overwriting your own executable when you lazily unpack your update into the directory that sanity says it should have been stored in.
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No. Well, only the privilege of not overwriting your own executable when you lazily unpack your update into the directory that sanity says it should have been stored in.
Ok, but why not "
Program Files\Realtek Updater
" and "Program Files\Realtek
"?
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If I was less lazy, I'd set up wireshark or something and see if it's phoning home.
It's completely plausible that it isn't, and that the broken error handling for its failure to do so is where the leak is coming from.
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Ok, but why not "Program Files\Realtek Updater" and "Program Files\Realtek"?
Because Karl.
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I'd rather not. Try @Fox.
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Well FUCK YOU Karl
Karl, you dick.
I hear Discourse have hired a new developer...
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Finally nailed my Windows memory leak
I've been there man, well done. I spent over a year nailing down a random BSOD.
Have a beer and enjoy a job well done :-)
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Is that how it works? If you're inside Win directory, you get special privileges?
Not really. You do by default inherit the C:\Windows folder permissions, though.
Karl probably worked on Windows NT 3.5 drivers in the past and had no idea that was FUCKING 20 YEARS AGO GODDAMNED WHY ARE SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS SO FUCKING TERRIBLE AT THEIR JOBS!
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Storing your software in C:\Windows is bad. People got away with that in the 9x era, not so much since XP SP2 came around. And definitely not anymore since Vista.
Oh, and why did this topic not have a little blue ball next to it, despite having replied to it and the status set to Tracking? Fuck you, Discourse.
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Ctrl+F Karl not found. Obviously that page can't be trusted.
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Probably an unpaid intern who searched Google and copy pasted from stack overflow.
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Right; but why does code from 1994 even exist on Stack Overflow?
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Are you actually asking, or posing for 'fuck these oss guys'?
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Are you actually asking, or posing for 'fuck these oss guys'?
Huh? Is this dumb RealTek app open source? Or...?
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Realtek is known for absolute shit software, their drivers are generally worse than any other manufacturer.
As to why code from 1994 would be on stack overflow, someone probably shared some legacy code for some one off question, and then any revisions and updates probably got killed due to overcomplicating the answer by showing how to properly dispose objects. It's full circle to end up here.
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http://www.file.net/process/runsw.exe.html
This link was the most helpful:
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No worries mate. I quite regulary "review" my active processes. If I don't recognise the exe I zap it into google. Just be careful about which site you go to
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Thanks for that. You made me crack up in the middle of the school's library. Screw you.
Hillarious though. Really hillarious.
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I had something vaguely similar on an old laptop, also caused by shitty realtek drivers.
It was a fairly good laptop at the time, with a 1st gen core i5, but occasionally the CPU usage would go to ~50%, and task manager wouldn't show what was using it. I don't even remember how I tracked it down (the manufacturer was no help), but it ended up being something to do with the ethernet driver. Disabling ethernet in device manager completely fixed it..
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Discourse is being helpful, and ensuring that you never have to suffer from Blue Balls again.
Just don't piss off @PJH, or you might suffer Revenge of the Blue Balls
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I actually had this issue with a service wrapper that auto-started VirtualBox VMs in Windows. I replaced some disks, so the drives got remapped (and I haven't been arsed yet to fix it). After booting up the machine, within about an hour the system drive was 100% full and I couldn't figure out why until I realized the service was spewing errors to its log file (at a rate of probably 200/min) about being unable to query the state of the VMs (due to them being "missing" and all that).
Filed under: Don't yank the rug out from under your operating system, it rarely goes well...
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I figured you were going to say it was Java; their POS updater forkbombed my laptop just recently...
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Realtek is known for absolute shit software, their drivers are generally worse than any other manufacturer.
Remember when Microsoft re-engineered audio drivers to run outside of kernel space, so that 'bad drivers' would stop taking down systems?
In hindsight... that was probably to mitigate the Realtek problem...
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Realtek is known for absolute shit software, their drivers are generally worse than any other manufacturer.
They'd have to be going some to be worse than HP's.
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http://www.realtek.com.tw/default.aspx
LOOK AT IT!
> Best viewed at 800x600 with IE 6.0 or Netscape 7.02 or Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 or higher. > ©2015 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. All rights reserved.
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Best viewed at 800x600 with IE 6.0 or Netscape 7.02 or Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6 or higher. ©2015 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. All rights reserved.
<a
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http://cdn.funnyisms.com/fbf17c28-8326-4897-b4d6-caf1de3dd3da.jpg
rootin tootin contributin
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I'd bet money that what it's supposed to be doing is keeping drivers up to date (RunSoftwareUpdateServiceBackground, would be my guess). That entire class of software is almost as riddled with as IE toolbars.
Yes, but at least forcing everyone to write their own shitty updaters keeps MS out of antitrust trouble!
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But I don't have any problem with Realtek drivers or keeping them up-to-date on my computer.
Oh wait... I'm using Linux.
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I even keep Java up to date using apt.
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I thought everyone in the world stopped caring about Netscape after version 4.
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They'd have to be going some to be worse than HP's.
We're use almost exclusively HP. We generally don't have problems with their drivers. Disclaimer: we wipe all hardware received and clean install/image Windows Enterprise, downloading only drivers we need.
Benefit: no crapware (and unlike Lenovo, it doesn't come back either).
Occasional problem: device driver not found, usually something non-critical.
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I thought everyone in the world stopped caring about Netscape after version 4.
After?
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They'd have to be going some to be worse than HP's.
Yeahhhh... Realtek is worse. At least HP tries. Sometimes. Maybe.
Realtek is utterly crappy in every sense of the word.
Guess which device on my system didn't have drivers after I upgraded to 10?
You guessed it, the Belgium sound card. Made by...... Realtek Semiconductor Corp!
My 2-way radio programming adapter from the late 1990s worked immediately, but the 2-year old sound card didn't!
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I have a script for updating Go, but everything else gets updated through apt.
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no Python package to update with
pip
?