"Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

2022-01-19 19:03:46

Hello, I am now experiencing a strange problem:
1) after a couple of hours of regular play, FB 1.6.9 reports "Bad Allocation Error" and cannot play anything else
2) just after 30 minutes playing I noticed a strange behavior (as per attached screenshot), while saving (e.g.) the playlist I get an unusable Windows file panel.

Closing and restarting FB, the problem temporarily disappear.
May it be related to a memory leakage?
Any suggestion about how to troubleshoot this issue?

Regards, Andrea

Re: "Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

Reply #1 – 2022-01-19 19:18:58

This is starting to sound a lot like bad sectors/failing drive.  I would advise doing a thorough drive/sector test using the tool supplied/recommended by your drive's manufacturer.

Re: "Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

Reply #2 – 2022-01-20 06:09:35

Your OS shouldn't start bugging out even if foobar2000 runs out of memory. Since you have 4 GB of RAM you would still have 1 GB of it left when foobar2000 maxes out (large address aware programs can use at max 3 GB there).

I don't think hardware is at fault if the problem disappears on restart of anything.

Apart from memory being leaked it sounds like GDI objects or some other limited global handles are leaked. We can be pretty sure foobar2000 is not the cause but a third party component.
You can probably find out what causes it by enabling Task Manager's Details/Processes tab to show Working set (memory), Handles, Threads, User objects and GDI objects. Right click on the header line to get a context menu where these can be added.

Now play something in foobar2000 and observe if anything keeps growing under the two Memory columns or the other new fields you added. Remove components until the growing stops.

Re: "Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

Reply #3 – 2022-01-20 15:14:28

Hello @Case and @sveakul , thanks your tips. I will investigate as per your suggestions.
Kind regards and again thank for your prompt help,
Andrea

Re: "Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

Reply #4 – 2022-01-20 17:18:19

AndreaT are you perchance using Intel HD 630 video drivers?  There was a long run of a bug in those that resulted in RAM usage by the dwm.exe process (Desktop Window Manager) steadily increasing to monumental proportions.  This has finally been fixed with the newest release of the Intel drivers (https://community.intel.com/t5/Graphics/BUG-dwm-exe-uses-memory-leakage-with-Intel-HD-Graphics-630/td-p/1222297/page/30).  It certainly affected my system (Windows 10 21H2 x64).

Re: "Bad Allocation Error" and strange artifacts in Windows panel ...

Reply #5 – 2022-01-22 19:56:57

Hello @sveakul and @Case , following your instruction I found that probably I fallen back into the problem of having Foobar running out of memory. I have a very large library that's still growing over time.

So, verified that my video card/chip is not HD630 but the 965 mobile express, I noticed that just at the start-up Foobar was using approximately 1.3GB of RAM, and that it was quickly growing.

So, I modified once more the "LargeFieldsConfig.txt" and now at the start-up Foobar is using only 1.15GB of RAM.
I am so mitigating temporarily the problem because, as @Peter instructed me a couple of years ago, reducing too much the dBase fields than I am having other problems of dBase inconsistency (wrong record value and so on).

So, I hope that the since long promised replacement of Album RAM module with an SQL-based would take place soon.
Herein attached the current LargeFieldsConfig.txt that allow me to run again Foobar for longer than 2h.
Please, kindly let me know if I can optimize it more or do other to reduce Foobar RAM usage by Album List module.

Many thanks and kind regards, Andrea