Too many handles and threads.

[xa376]

I noticed i have over 1200 threads and 35000 handles running. I also have 7 gigs of ram in use without a game running. I read that these are high numbers and I don't know what the problem is.

 

[elemein]

Well why not tell us what IS using up so much memory in Task Manager?

 

[xa376]

That's the thing... nothing

 

[elemein]

If you restart your computer does the problem persist?

 

[xa376]

Seems not to but i will keep it running for a while and see. My computer was on for 5 days before i just restarted it. I also noticed that before I restarted my non-paged pool was 4.4 gigs.

 

[hunter315]

Thats not super abnormal, right now i am showing 38000 handles and 1460 threads, windows spawns a hell of a lot of threads, as does your web browser, chrome is probably responsible for 10% of those threads since it spawns a new process for each tab. Closing steam and skype killed off 100 threads and 3000 handles for me. Mine has been up for a while and i have several chrome tabs open right now, ill see how low it goes when i close it.

It is important to realize that most of those threads are not active, most of them are windows processes that run a tiny chunk of code ever few seconds, but they are each unique so they each get their own handle so windows can get to them.


Edit - Closing chrome brought be down to 950/27000 meaning chrome was responsible for 400 threads and 8000 handles. I don't really know why you are actually checking that number though, most people don't pay attention to it and analyzing it is more likely to make you "see a problem" where there really isn't one.

 

[xa376]

Well I had assumed that that was largely a cause for my ram issue after reading other peoples averages.

 

[hunter315]

Windows will use as much ram as it can to keep active processes in ram rather than paging them out, if you only have 4 GB you will have less ram in use than if you have 8 or 16GB. Since you said you had 7GB of ram in use im going to assume 16 or 32GB?

I would only consider 7GB of ram used to be an issue if you are only running 8 GB, otherwise it is just windows trying to make things go smoother, having to call to the hard drive for a page file is very very slow compared to calling it from RAM.