What can my 32-bit app be doing that consumes gigabytes of physical RAM?

A co-worker mentioned to me a few months ago that one of our internal Delphi applications seems to be taking up 8 GB of RAM. I told him:

That's not possible

A 32-bit application only has a 32-bit virtual address space. Even if there was a memory leak, the most memory it could consume is 2 GB. After that allocations would fail (as there would be no empty space in the virtual address space). And in the case of a memory leak, the virtual pages will be swapped out to the pagefile, freeing up physical RAM.

But he noted that Windows Resource Monitor indicated that less than 1 GB of RAM was available on the system. And while our app was only using 220 MB of virtual memory: closing it freed up 8 GB of physical RAM.

So I tested it

I let the application run for a few weeks, and today I finally decided to test it.

First I look at memory usage before closing the app, using Process Explorer:
- the working set (RAM) is: 241 MB
- total virtual memory used: 409 MB
And I used Resource Monitor to check memory used by the app, and total RAM in use:
- virtual memory allocated by application: 252 MB
- physical memory in use: 14 GB
And then memory usage after closing the app:
- physical memory in use: 6.6 GB (7.4 GB less)
I also used Process Explorer to look at a breakdown of physical RAM use before and after. The only difference is that 8 GB of RAM really was uncommitted and now free:

Item Before After

Commit Charge (K) 15,516,388 7,264,420

Physical Memory Available (K) 1,959,480 9,990,012

Zeroed Paging List (K) 539,212 8,556,340

Item	Before	After
Commit Charge (K)	15,516,388	7,264,420
Physical Memory Available (K)	1,959,480	9,990,012
Zeroed Paging List (K)	539,212	8,556,340

Note: It's somewhat interesting that Windows would waste time instantly zeroing out all the memory, rather than simply putting it on a standby list, and zero it out as needed (as memory requests need to be satisfied).

None of those things explain what the RAM was doing (What are you doing just sitting there! What do you contain!?)

What is in that memory?

That RAM must contain something useful; it must have some purpose. For that I turned to SysInternals' RAMMap. It can break down memory allocations.

The only clue that RAMMap provides is that the 8 GB of physical memory was associated with something called Session Private. These Session Private allocations are not associated with any process (i.e. not my process):

Item	Before	After
Session Private	8,031 MB	276 MB
Unused	1,111 MB	8,342 MB

I'm certainly not doing anything with EMS, XMS, AWE, etc.

What could possibly be happening in a 32-bit non-Administrator application that is causing Windows to allocate an additional 7 GB of RAM?

It's not a cache of swapped out items
it's not a SuperFetch cache

It's just there, consuming RAM.

Session Private

The only information about "Session Private" memory is from a blog post announcing RAMMap:

Session Private: Memory that is private to a particular logged in session. This will be higher on RDS Session Host servers.

What kind of app is this?

This is a 32-bit native Windows application (i.e. not Java, not .NET). Because it is a native Windows application it, of course, makes heavy use of the Windows API.

It should be noted that I wasn't asking people to debug the application; I was hoping a Windows developer out there would know why Windows might hold memory that I never allocated. Having said that, the only thing changed recently (in the last 2 or 3 years) that could cause such a thing is the feature that takes a screenshot every 5 minutes and saves it to the user's %LocalAppData% folder. A timer fires every five minutes:

QueueUserWorkItem(TakeScreenshotThreadProc);

And pseudo-code of the thread method:

void TakeScreenshotThreadProc(Pointer data)
{
   String szFolder = GetFolderPath(CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDTA);
   ForceDirectoryExists(szFolder);

   String szFile = szFolder + "\\" + FormatDateTime("yyyyMMdd'_'hhnnss", Now()) + ".jpg";

   Image destImage = new Image();
   try
   {
      CaptureDesktop(destImage);
      
      JPEGImage jpg = new JPEGImage();
      jpg.CopyFrom(destImage); 
      jpg.CompressionQuality = 13;
      jpg.Compress();

      HANDLE hFile = CreateFile(szFile, GENERIC_WRITE, 
            FILE_SHARE_READ | FILE_SHARE_WRITE, null, CREATE_ALWAYS,
            FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ARCHIVE | FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ENCRYPTED, 0);
      //error checking elucidated
      try
      {
          Stream stm = new HandleStream(hFile);
          try
          {
             jpg.SaveToStream(stm);
          }
          finally
          {
             stm.Free();
          }
       }
       finally
       {
          CloseHandle(hFile);
       }
    }
    finally
    {
       destImage.Free();
    }
}

Most likely somewhere in your application you are allocating system resources and not releasing them. Any WinApi call that creates an object and returns a handle could be a suspect. For example (be careful running this on a system with limited memory - if you don't have 6GB free it will page badly):

Program Project1;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
uses
  Windows;

var
  b : Array[0..3000000] of byte;
  i : integer;    
begin
  for i := 1 to 2000 do 
    CreateBitmap(1000, 1000, 3, 8, @b);
  ReadLn;
end.

This consumes 6GB of session memory due to the allocation of bitmap objects that are not subsequently released. Application memory consumption remains low because the objects are not created on the application's heap.

Without knowing more about your application, however, it is very difficult to be more specific. The above is one way to demonstrate the behaviour you are observing. Beyond that, I think you need to debug.

In this case, there are a large number of GDI objects allocated - this isn't necessarily indicative, however, since there are often a large number of small GDI objects allocated in an application rather than a large number of large objects (The Delphi IDE, for example, will routinely create >3000 GDI objects and this is not necessarily a problem).

In @Abelisto's example (in comments), by contrast :

Program Project1;

{$APPTYPE CONSOLE}
uses
  SysUtils;

var
  i : integer;
  sr : TSearchRec;
begin
  for i := 1 to 1000000 do FindFirst('c:\*', faAnyFile, sr);
  ReadLn;
end.

Here the returned handles are not to GDI objects but are rather search handles (which fall under the general category of Kernel Objects). Here we can see that there are a large number of handles used by the process. Again, process memory consumption is low but there is a large increase in session memory used.

Similarly, the objects might be User Objects - these are created by calls to things like CreateWindow, CreateCursor, or by setting hooks with SetWindowsHookEx. For a list of WinAPI calls that create objects and return handles of each type, see :

Handles and Objects : Object Categories -- MSDN

This can help you start to track down the issue by narrowing it to the type of call that could be causing the problem. It may also be in a buggy third-party component, if you are using any.

A tool like AQTime can profile Windows allocations, but I'm not sure if there is a version that supports Delphi5. There may be other allocation profilers that can help track this down.

So I tested it

What is in that memory?

Session Private

What kind of app is this?

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