possible memory leak then 'resources not found'

[roland_schweiger]

System:
Desktop PC with Intel I7 9700k @ 3,6GHz, 16 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX 1650, Windows11Pro.
FAH Client 8.49 configured for the GPU + 6 CPU Cores.
Have the client up and running for a few days, also joined the Gridcoin team as i have a CPID anyway (although not yet showing unfortunately).

Got a few WUs and after about 1 1/2 days my RAM started to fill up almost to max, then the pagefile grew slightly, finally the WUs were dumped and i got an error message like 'resources unavailable'
Only a PC restart helped, yet when i first got new WUs the FAC Client 8.49 crashed and only on second restart did i get new WUs which work up to date.
QUESTION : is there any known cause or is it most probably that the work units were bad?
LOG files do not help (at least not the ones i can see in the web interface) because they don't date back to the moment when the crash happened.
Are there any hidden settings or similar, any suggestions what i can do to prevent things like this happening?
greetings from Vienna
Roland Schweiger

[muziqaz]

Please grab a screenshot of the task manager or similar with fahclient process stats

[Joe_H]

There are three possible places for memory leaks. One would be in fah-client itself, it runs in the background handling WU fetching and returns as well as logging. Then there is the browser used to run the web control. Finally, and least likely are the folding cores. They run the WU from beginning to end and then exit after packing up the results for return by fah-client to the servers. Since they do not run continuously, not as likely to be the source.

If it is the web control running in the browser, then exiting when not being actively used would avoid the memory leak. Possibly using another browser would avoid it as well.

[roland_schweiger]

would not have imagined a relatively simple piece of software like a webbrowser (compared to complex computational tasks) could be the cause of such problems. just out of trail and error i used Edge instead of Chrome and "installed" the webinterface-page "as an app" (whatever that does, i think it is not much more than a link on the windows desktop) but since i did that, no more memory leaks seemed to appear. Still i cannot really believe that this can be the culprit but thanks for the inspiration.
When in comes to work fetch, there are sometimes strange behaviours in F@H.
E.g. i have the nVidia GTX1650/Cuda enabled and i also have 6 CPU cores. Work is being done. I then also tried to enable my onboard graphics INTEL UHD-630 (yes i know it is slow but there might be some work) then the webinterface of F@H shows a red thermometer bar with repeating attempts to get work for the Intel card, no WUs found. But then when my CPU WUs are done and also when the nVidia WUs are done, the client gets no more work at all. I then must untick / disable the internal Intel GPU again and everything returns to normal.
apart from such little things the client works fine, i even now get a little bit of GRC RAC and also have 1 BOINC project enabled. Even on my elderly machine considerable amount of work is being done and i set nvidia card to 70% performance and in windows control panel i set "max cpu performance" to 85% which reduces clock cycle from 3,6 to 3,1 GHz and the machine stays nicely cool. Good to see that with a little bit of finger tips one can even get a slightly older machine to do sensible work.

[Joe_H]

The Intel UHD 630 I would recommend just leaving disabled. While supported, few projects are generating small enough WUs for these iGPUs. There was more work for them when first used on a trial basis during COVID, but most of the small systems are being set up to use CPU processing these days. Intel did at least get some performance information out of the work done, and that may have helped with driver and hardware development going into the recent Battlemage cards which are usable and being used for F@h.

The CPU cores can in theory be set up to offload some vector processing to a GPU. That was investigated a bit a few years ago, but setting things up so that it would actually improve processing enough turned out to be complicated.

As for browsers mattering, some do a better job of handling Javascript pages that tend to continuously run like the Web Control. Much of the page downloaded when you connect is written in Javascript making it usable across a lot of platforms.

[ETA_2025]

just out of trail and error i used Edge instead of Chrome and "installed" the webinterface-page "as an app" (whatever that does, i think

I believe Chrome loads every tab when first opened. If you have a lot of tabs open, that would use a lot of RAM. Firefox only loads a tab when you go to it. I don't know what Edge does. So it is possible that your web browser (Chrome) is responsible for the 'memory leak'.

Task Manager can show how much memory every app is using, in a condescend view (one instance of Firefox, not one instance for every tab of Firefox).