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Windows 10 1909 MBAM 4.1.2.73 memory leaking


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I did a quick check-up of this current version of MBAM on an older version  of Windows 10 and I was perplexed to see how quickly this instance of a Antivirus solution kept allocating more and more RAM over time. Within a short timespan it managed to claim nearly 300 MB of RAM while an other AV solution happily kept running without little to no change to it's RAM footprint.

Yes, I am well aware Beta's needs more tweaking to get the bugs out. But this was unreal to me.

Another thing that is beyond me is the fact only those with a full license seem to get access to the Beta program. I for one would never burden my paying clients with access to Beta's as they most likely would not pay for nearly finished products anyway but to get a stable version maintained for for the duration of their subscription of their production systems. Beta access should be a perk for those willing to lent their computers to a "free" AV-solution knowing they pay for it by testing a raw product.

At the end of the day I of course removed this MBAM beta as soon as I could. Clearly this beta is in my humble opinion nowhere near release candidate status.

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38 minutes ago, BillH99999 said:

As additional feedback to Malwarebytes... I've been running the latest beta since yesterday without turning off or rebooting my PC and it is only using 12.5 MB of memory. 

I'm on Win 10 1909 also.

Bill

Ah... I was confused.  I was looking at the Malwarebytes Tray Application.

Malwarebytes Services is using 430 MB for me.

Bill

Edited by BillH99999
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Greetings,

I may be able to shed some light on this issue.  In developing the protection for Malwarebytes, several decisions needed to be made with regards to how things like resource usage and overall system performance; aspects of a program that can vary wildly depending on how they are implemented.  For a long time, most PC users and enthusiasts retained the idea that since RAM was one of the most limited resources in a PC, any application that used too much was seen as 'bad'.  This has changed with RAM becoming cheaper, higher amounts of RAM being standard (as well as required for most modern operating systems), and systems being capable of using higher capacities of RAM, particularly with the widespread adoption of the x64 architecture/platform, which increased the potential maximum of RAM far beyond the approximately 3.25GB~4GB saddling 32-bit/x86 operating systems and hardware.

It is because of these limits, and past solutions for dealing with them (especially paging to disk for virtual memory when physical RAM has been exhausted) that using a large amount of RAM was harmful to system performance, however these limitations and performance issues do not paint an accurate picture as to how modern software and operating systems handle high RAM usage.  In fact, in a modern system it is far more significant from a performance perspective for an application to use as few CPU cycles as possible, as this is by far the more significant resource when it comes to overall system responsiveness and performance.

I mention these things because when the protection in Malwarebytes was developed, it was determined that storing databases on disk and accessing them every time a new process/file needs to be analyzed hurt performance too much, slowing things down.  Instead, it was decided to store the vast majority of the database in memory, eliminating the seek time/load time/read time for databases on disk, which has the added benefit of relying far less on the speed of the storage media used for the operating system, meaning even on a system with a slow 5400RPM hard drive, such as a notebook, the real-time protection in Malwarebytes should still be fast and responsive.  It also means that when using the system for other tasks, Malwarebytes' protection should not hit the CPU very much, leaving that most significant resource free for other tasks.

Now, back to what I mentioned earlier regarding the longheld wisdom that using as little RAM as possible is a good thing, and that having free/unused RAM is beneficial for performance, because neither of those things are true.  Free/unused RAM has absolutely no benefit to performance; the only time it becomes an issue is when you actually run out of RAM and then attempt to execute a process that needs more RAM than is available, and this is where all that paging to disk happens, however if you have a sufficient amount of RAM, it is an issue you should never encounter.  On the other hand, if an application deliberately hobbles its performance and efficiency to make a number in Task Manager lower so that people will stop complaining about the application using too much RAM (even if there is no evidence that it actually has any impact on system performance or the responsiveness of other processes or the system as a whole), then they are doing a disservice to their users by costing them precious CPU cycles, which are very limited and very sensitive to competition from other processes/applications when executing demanding tasks (such as playing 3D games or pretty much any other process that consumes a lot of CPU).

Here are a couple of links on the subject anyone reading this thread may find informative:

    - https://www.howtogeek.com/128130/htg-explains-why-its-good-that-your-computers-ram-is-full/ 
    - https://linux-mm.org/Low_On_Memory

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