Software running out of memory and crashing: RESOLVED

OK, I've been running the Zune software for some time, and haven't had any problems.  I have all my music stored on Windows Home Server, and had the music share as read-only for a while due to the data corruption bug that has been plaguing home server.  So now I've installed the Power Pack for WHS, and now I've changed the security back to full control, since the issue of data corruption is supposed to be fixed. 

Since doing that, I've noticed that just sitting there, there seems to be about a 30 mbps connection to my home server, as I assume that the zune software is updating metadata, album art, or whatever the heck it does.  Since I assumed that eventually it would get done, I didn't worry about it too much.  But later when I checked the processes, zune was using 2.5 GIGS of RAM.  I didn't worry about it too much, as I figured that it was temporary and I'd let it get done with whatever it was doing.  However, instead of that, I got memory errors from Windows saying I was out of memory, and it needed to close the zune software.  I clicked ok, and it shut the zune software down.  Then I started it back up, and had to leave for a bit.  When I came back, my computer was grinding to a halt, and there was an exception error.  I tried to report back to MS, but then the zune software restarted and just started eating memory.  When it got to about a gig, I killed the process and rebooted.
 
Now I'm back into it, and once again it seems to be doing the same thing - generating lots of network traffic and eating memory / CPU. 

I have Vista 64 bit Home Premium edition, dual core with 4 gigs of RAM.  

Any ideas?

One idea...the 2.5 software update does a massive metadata update-  seems like that is something you suspect.  If the timing around when you updated is close, that could be it.  And, you can interrupt this metadate update safely and it will resume at the next session.  If your collection is very big, it can take quite some time.

Well, I keep trying to do it, but it keeps running out of memory.  It uses up my entire physical memory, plus all my page file (which in total is about 10 gigs!).  It seems like there would be a way to throttle the software to keep it from using up a certain percentage of memory.  When this happens my computer just crawls (obviously).  I'll keep trying to run it -- my music, photos, videos are around 30 gigs.

But when I try and leave it on overnight, its dead when I get back in the morning.  I'll keep attempting to run while I'm here and see if it ever gets done with what it's doing in the next few days or so.  I do notice that it is updating the modified dates of most of my music, so it is definitely working on something.  Hopefully it gets done soon.  I'll post back when it is done or if it keeps happening over the next week.

OK...it sounds less and less like the metadata update.
I'm not familiar with your configuration...you should check the system requirements for the Zune carefully, here:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928413?sd=zune
And you may want to try uninstalling using unzoone (a more complete uninstaller than windows...) here:  http://remove-it.org/tools/unzoone
( found this at zuneboards.com  - you may want to head over there for help, too.)

My system specs are more than adequate.  I'm thinking of uninstalling / reinstalling.  Wondering if there is any way to back up the podcasts, as I think that would be the biggest pain of all of this (I have quite a pile of them).  All the other music / videos, etc I could just reimport, but while I would see the podcasts directories, I don't think that has any tie back to where the original podcast is found.

If anyone has any familiarity with this process, I would love to hear about it!

Thanks!

Reinstalling will probably remove your podcast subscriptions, but not necessarily the podcast files (which are in a \podcast subdirectory in your music folder.)  To be sure you save them, you could move the folder...

Yeah, I got that -- but for some I don't even know what the original URL for the RSS feed is.  And I don't see how you can find that via the software.  They have a website link, but that seems to go to the main websites, and tracking down the particular feed I'm looking for can be a pain.  Not to mention keeping track of where I am in the feed (but obviously not as big of a deal that way).

To get the XML URL of an already downloaded podcast, right click on one of the podcast episodes and select the 'properties' option. The URL should be the second line in the Porperties dialog box. (picture)

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Zune MVP
Contributor, http://www.insidethecircle.net

Thanks, I never noticed that before on the individual podcasts -- I guess I assumed that the information would be retained in the feed setup or something.  Still no easy way to export all the podcasts as an OPML or something like that I guess?

 

After uninstalling and reinstalling as outlined in kb 929358, Zune.exe had run up all the memory again.  Over 3 gigs and counting.

 

Is there any known issue with a network location for music storage?  I would certainly think that wouldn't be a problem, but it definitely seems to still be having troubles.  I'm going to wipe everything completely (including my configuration on both the zune software and the device), and see if that helps, but so far I'm striking out.

Maybe it's time to call customer support.  :(

RTM or SP1 version of Vista?

 

Are you syncing to the device at all at the same time any of this is happening?  Or is it straight-up communication between the WHS and your Zune client?

 

Thanks.

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gina / Zune Software Product Team / This posting is provided "as-is" with no warranties, and confers no rights

 holydev wrote:

RTM or SP1 version of Vista?

 

Are you syncing to the device at all at the same time any of this is happening?  Or is it straight-up communication between the WHS and your Zune client?

 

Thanks.

No, not syncing -- this is just having the zune software on -- device not plugged in at all.  It will be fine for a while -- maybe a few minutes, maybe longer, and then I can watch and it just starts eating memory.  I have cleared out my database files, reinstalled from scratch, ran the zune media collection reset tool, and it just keeps coming back.

At this point, after the reinstall and media reset, I haven't even plugged my zune back in and it's memory leaking.  It generally hangs out a fairly long while between 90-120M.  Then all of a sudden the memory will just start going up about 5 - 25 megs / second until it totally overwhelms the machine.  The time before last, it took about 2-1/2 minutes while it was sitting at 90 M, then started ticking up.  Over the next 2 minutes it got up to using around 2 gigs, before I shut it down.

This last time, it sat around 120-130M for around 7-8 minutes, and then just started incrementing, so that two minutes later it was up to about 2 gigs of usage.

Just not sure where to go from here.

(Oh Vista x64 Home Premium - SP1)

I have finally found someone with the same issue. I also updated to Power pack 1 on my WHS 3 days ago. Running Vista SP1, if I sync my zune, it locks up. Either way, memory usage fills my entire 2gigs within 3 songs, slowing my machine to a crawl. CPU usage stays below 10% though. I have to close Zune through the task manager, which still takes well over a minute to release all the memory, meanwhile my desktop is all but locked up.

This same exact thing happens with my wife's notebook, and this is only after the PP1 release of WHS. Our music library is roughly 12gigs on the shared WHS folder only, no local files, no podcasts.

I'd have to assume this is an issue with the WHS data corruption algorithm. Apparently the whole cause of that bug in the first place was multiple hooks open on NTFS files when opened remotely.

Anyway, there is not a single word about this anywhere on the WHS forums, I'll have to start one and report the issue as a bug...very unfortunate that a product specifically aimed at data integrity and central file location does neither of  these things reliably almost a year after release.


*edit* Here's the post on WHS forums, the more people we can get together with this issue, the better:

http://forums.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver/ShowPost.aspx?siteid=50&postid=3518818