Oops...explorer.exe taking up 1.2GB of RAM!

Yes, explorer.exe took up 1.2GB of RAM on my system just a few minutes ago. It was extremely laggy working on the desktop!

There are no viruses or anything like that, this just happened when I tried to copy 500MB of email from one of my online accounts to my computer.

 

Was that in Win7 ? I've noticed in Win7 that RAM is being eaten up slowly from 22% up to 50%. Takes a couple of hours to reach 50%.

 

Whoa! What the heck did it need THAT much RAM for?! Surely not just to copy some data to a new location.

 

Nope, that was Vista32.

Well, I was copying about 500MB of email...I know it is related to that. It probably tried to put it all in the emails I was copying into the clipboard and use that to copy.

 

That's the exact reason why.

 

Well, Windows could be a bit smarter about how it copies large chunks of data...I guess not.

 

There might be glitches of memory leaks for the caching process. Personally, I've not experienced any problem with the ram issue and explorer is using about 20MB of ram in Win7 ultimate. The system however sort of lags because the processor is working very hard to transfer cache and transfer the data.

BTW.. try logging off the other running account, then check out the ram ussage if the glitch appear again.

Edit: LOL.. just read someone's response. Copying something to clip board is the same thing as storing the data to ram then copy it out of ram to somewhere else. You're essentially enforcing windows to copy the data to your ram. Copy to clip board then pasted somewhere else is very different from copy and paste. If you copy and paste, windows will only cache parts of the data at one time unlike the symptom you have.

So there's nothing wrong.

 

dam thats alot of ram usage just for explorer.exe then again it happens to my hp dv6871us every once in a while dont knoe why... but when is does happen mine says (explorer.exe has stop working : options to fix:end process) then the explorer.exe restarts..... weird dont knoe why it does that.

 

Explorer generally crashes when:
-there's very little cpu power (explorer will timeout and appear "crashed")
-it's fed with huge amounts of data while having insufficient amount of system resource to work with
-sometimes dealing with unresponsive network drives/hdd/external devices (again, it appears as nonresponsive)
-system conflict
-memory leak

 

that is mad funny lol

 

what a memory leak?

 

It is basically when a program asks for RAM, then never tells the OS it is done using it. So it "leaks" in that the program keeps requesting more and more memory.

I didn't really think about the whole copy/paste thing when I did it. I guess it is easy to see how/why it does it the way it does, just kind of funny I suppose.

 

When heat causes a small hole to form in one of the memory chips and all of the information starts to leak out.


Okay, okay. Serious time.

When a program uses memory, it creates a pointer to that location and it reserves the memory for itself. If you have a program dropping pointers (either from a glitch or from shoddy programming) and not telling the system that memory is available, then you have the program reserving increasing amounts of memory that cannot be used, because there is no pointer to that memory block anymore, it can't clear the space; and because it's reserved memory by the application that dropped the pointer, nothing else is going to infringe on that reservation.

Memory leaks are the primary reason Windows 95 would be fine when you started it up, then the next day you'd have to reboot it because it was so slow. Explorer would use a block of memory for something, be like "okay I'm done I don't need that data anymore, destroy the pointer to the data," but it would never be able to use the memory because it was not actually cleared. When it's rebooted, the memory all gets new pointers so it's all available again.
Hopefully that's simple enough terms that most people will understand.


Woo, one of the only things college actually taught me!

 

Put in simpler term, memory that is wasted is called memory leak.
A simple analogy is a leaking tap. Resources are depleted everday but they're not used by anything. One day water will run out and we'll all die.

 

Wow, thats one serious analogy! I'm sure a memory leak isn't nearly as bad as all the water running out.

 

Good thing that almost all of the world's best fresh water are abundant where I live. I don't even have a water meter in my house. Water is included in the property tax. It's about $1 per day per household. You can use as much water as you want or as little as you want and the price of water will still be $1 per day.
Where I live, lots of people drink tap water. Studies have shown that even our toilet water is cleaner than most bottle water that you can buy in the supermarket. Yay.. go Canada.
The bad thing about Canada's water is that there's too much of it. When everyone runs out of water, they'll come to canada and steal "my" water. United States is already doing that. :<

 

You can just right click, then end the process, then go to File>New Task(Run) and type "explorer.exe" and it will refresh itself. Only thing you lose when you exit explorer.exe is your taskbar. Your desktop is still usable.

 

And the southwest United States is already stealing our Great Lakes water as well. And they want to steal a lot more. Don't worry, it's not all Americans who want to steal your water. A lot of us are actually on your side in this.

 

Not such a good way to prevent the waste of a valuable, limited (albeit vast) resource. A fee not based on actual usage merely encourages payors to overuse the resource.

 

That's why my city probably has the highest water consumption per person in the world. I heard the statistic say that my city use more than 200gallons a day per person. We water our lawns, flush our toilets or do anything with the world's best drinking water.

For a couple of years, our resevoir was actually flooded by excess amount of rainfall even though we use so much water. This year, our precipitation is way above average. We almost broke our 30 year highiest snowfall in 1 month record this winter. "Global warming" is causing our city's average temperature to drop and increased our precipitation dramatically. So far, we're about 10 degrees celsius below seasonal average temperature.

 

Sounds like you guys oughta be exporting that stuff now and charging for it instead of sitting around worrying about someone coming up to "steal" it.

 

We are already exporting it. I think nestle, and a host of other bottled water company are being charged $1000 / year by our government. We're getting ripped off pretty bad and our people are already sueing the government or something. I think there's a pipeline draining water from our lakes to US as well. I'm not sure.

 

Is that $1,000 Canadian, or $1,000 US? (Or does that really matter?) Regardless, that's a rip-off; it's the same problem with individual users, only writ large - if it costs me $1,000 per annum whether I take 1 gallon or a billion gallons, I'll take as much as I please, thank you very much, no matter how much I waste along the way.

 

Psh, 1.2GB is nothing... Talk to me when you hit 2GB for Explorer.