Member Avatar for rproffitt

From Stardock's newsletter I read "Handles are killing your PC" and checked in on the apps and handles to discover the stock Killer Network app was way out there at over 906,000 (906 THOUSAND) handles. This was a pretty interesting find and had me off to the maker for latest suite and drivers.

Result? The 906,000 number dropped to 900 handles or a thousand fold less.

Here's the full text of the message and link.
"Handles are killing your PC

The handle issue is a pretty big deal, and you may never have even heard of them. Let's fix that.

Right now, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Go to the Performance tab. You will see the word "Handles" over on the right. On Windows 10, you should boot with around 60,000 handles used. This is actually pretty bad, but no biggie.

But, many people are starting to run enough programs to get over 100,000. And at around 120,000 handles... bad things start to happen. Your PC will get slow. Graphical elements might not show up. Programs may not launch. Long before you run out of memory, you will likely run out of handles - it's a problem that Microsoft really needs to fix.

So, what can you do?

Click on the "Details" tab. Now, right click on the name column, choose "Select Columns," and then choose "Handles." Now sort the list of processes by handles. Anything using more than 5,000 is not good (unless it's a game). But, keep an eye on anything using lots of handles and you should be fine."

Stardock didn't publish this except in their newsletter so here's a forum discussion about this issue.
https://forums.stardock.com/427418/do-handles-matter-in-win7

Edited by rproffitt because: Spelling error correction.
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Member Avatar for ryantroop

Is this a MS issue or just developers being lazy and not putting their toys away? (or both)

How many of those handles may have been ghosts that are just doing nothing? How many were socket connections that were active instead of using select or IOCPs?

Member Avatar for rproffitt

@ryantroop. Since I can't get into the driver and app's source code I can only speculate where the issue is.

But since ripping out the old and installing the new did find a thousand fold difference it's clear that the developer was the issue. Microsoft? The fact the OS stood up to all this has me credit MS for no BSOD under this condition. Yup, W10.

I'm going to check this out as I check out more of the office machines.

As to socket connections, so few. No browsers open, etc. Already turned off W10's update sharing.

In parting, this appears to be a thing since forever on Windows.

Member Avatar for rproffitt

Let's put on our lab coat. We're going in.

"Any process that has more than a ten thousand handles open at any given point in time is likely either poorly designed or has a handle leak, so a limit of 16 million is essentially infinite..."

Later he reveals we can use 4,096 bytes as to what to estimate for RAM use per handle. So that 910K+ handle usage ate 3,727,360,000 or just under 4GB of RAM. While we do have very nice machines at the office, this is an obvious thing to fix.

Why I posted it is I'm getting a few PCs that don't budge on performance and I'm keeping an eye out for new areas to check.

Member Avatar for ryantroop

It's a cool thing to look out for. Thanks for the update :)

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