LuxRiot Blog

The information applies to:

• LuxRiot 1.2.16 and more recent, LuxRiot Light 1.2.16 and more recent

Summary

LuxRiot watchdog is capable of monitoring amount of pool nonpaged memory in use by operating system (Memory\Pool Nonpaged Bytes performance counter). The feature protects from overuse of memory which may bring entire system into unstable state.

Some versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems (presumably non-server operating systems) appear to have memory leak problems caused by long and intensive network activity. Monitoring of pool nonpaged memory usage offers an option to automatically restart LuxRiot applications and/or reboot operating system to recover from these problems.

Description

Pool nonpaged memory is an area of physical memory used by the operating system for objects that cannot be written to disk, but must remain in physical memory as long as they are allocated. Unreasonable overuse of pool nonpaged memory, such as memory leak, may bring operating system into unstable state.

For example of unstability, the system may stop serving remote network connections, then fail to start new applications and finally finish with operating system crash.

LuxRiot offers an option to provide a threshold for amount of memory in use and take actions to recover from the problem on exceeding the threshold. By default the threshold is disabled and the value of the threshold should be carefully chosen for a particular system. For dedicated DVR servers a choice of a threshold of 50 megabytes is appropriate. A more careful choice of the threshold is 3-4 times normal usage of pool nonpaged memory at a peak time on the server.

The threshold is defined on a Maintenance property page of software watchdog properties:

To access the property page: select the server of interest in structure tree, right click server’s entry, choose Tasks, Manage Watchdogs menu items, double click Software Watchdog list item and switch to Performance tab.