# Hey TiVo, Wake Up and Smell the Memory Leak!



## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

What exactly does it take to get someone at TiVo to take ownership of this problem?

It's very clear that part of the TiVo desktop package, namely a background process called TiVoTransfer.exe, has a horrible memory leak. I've been seeing it on my own system since November. It's mentioned in a number of threads here on TiVo community, for example this one, which includes links to other threads that discuss it:

http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=377219&highlight=Memory+Leak

As far as I can tell from browsing the threads, nobody at TiVo has addressed this problem.

I've been on the phone with TiVo several times about this now. Several days ago, they told me on the phone that I should try removing and re-installing the TiVo software. So I did that. I downloaded a fresh copy of 2.5.1 from the TiVo web site. And I rebooted and restarted everything again and began another batch of transfers. And, just as in every case, a couple of days later the task manager is showing that TiVoTransfer.exe is taking 1,210,084 K of memory. It just keeps growing and growing until it is stopped or it brings down the whole system.

And I found more useful information about the issue from 5 minutes of looking around TiVo Community forums than I got from multiple calls to TiVo customer support. TiVo's CSRs just kept telling me that the problem must be that I have a virus or that I have too many other things running on my machine and that I should remove other programs from my start list, and I kept patiently explaining about how I can look in the Task Manager and see that it's the TiVoTransfer.exe process that is growing and growing, not some other program.

Finally, the CSR told me (I swear I'm not making this up) that it's Microsoft's problem because otherwise TiVo would be getting ``millions'' of other calls from customers about this -- the CSR said nobody else was having this problem, so it's not a TiVo problem.

Shortly after that, the CSR told me that it was Digital River's fault and there was nothing TiVo could do about it. Both the CSR and a manager told me that the TiVo CSRs don't really know much about the desktop software because they buy it from Digital River, so I should contact them, there's nothing TiVo can do about it. They were unswayed when I pointed out that I had paid $25 for an upgraded version of the software from the TiVo web site and that it's necessary for features that TiVo advertises.

So what does it take to get even an acknowledgment from TiVo that there's a problem that they should try to fix? Will that ever happen? From what I can see on TiVo Community, people have been seeing and discussing this problem for months at least, and coming up with work-arounds like batch scripts to stop and restart the TiVo software periodically. Does TiVo realize this? Do they care?


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## greg_burns (May 22, 2004)

HDChris said:


> Shortly after that, the CSR told me that it was Digital River's fault and there was nothing TiVo could do about it. Both the CSR and a manager told me that the TiVo CSRs don't really know much about the desktop software because they buy it from Digital River, so I should contact them, there's nothing TiVo can do about it.


Doesn't Digital River just handle the money transacation to purchase Plus? The software is all Tivo's.


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

greg_burns said:


> Doesn't Digital River just handle the money transacation to purchase Plus? The software is all Tivo's.


That's exactly what I thought before, too. But both the CSR and the manager I asked to speak to said that TiVo couldn't help me with the software because it comes from Digital River. They led me to a web form for submitting a service request to Digital River. Based on the form, it looked like it was intended only for problems with payments and getting the key to unlock the Desktop Plus features. I suspect that the TiVo people I talked to were either badly misinformed or just trying to get rid of me, but I suspended my disbelief and submitted the request to Digital River describing the memory leak. I'll see what kind of response I get.


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## DevdogAZ (Apr 16, 2003)

If it's such a problem, why not do a periodic reboot of the whole computer, or use the task manager to kill the process and then restart the TiVo Server? Seems like that would take all of 2 minutes once or twice a week.


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## Deanq4 (Sep 30, 2005)

mine worked fine after I cleared my cache so be sure to check that, seriously, it was that simple.


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

Deanq4 said:


> mine worked fine after I cleared my cache so be sure to check that, seriously, it was that simple.


Thanks for the tip. How do I clear the cache? That was never mentioned by TiVo customer support.

In the TiVo desktop's ``Preferences'' box, under ``Restart or Reset'', I see that one of the reset levels is ``Clear cached information''. But this is the only item on the list that is greyed-out for me, so I can't select it. I've tried the ``Just restart'' option on this menu at various times in the past, but it never works right for me -- something gets wedged and the TiVo software won't work after that until I reboot my machine.

In TiVo server properties, I already have the ``Maximum cache size'' set to the lowest possible value, 10 MB. I see that it lists a directory under ``Cache Options'', but that directory only seems to have a few dozen files with the .cache suffix. Each is only 1 or 2 kb. Is it safe and/or advisable to remove these files?

Thanks.


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

DevdogAZ said:


> If it's such a problem, why not do a periodic reboot of the whole computer, or use the task manager to kill the process and then restart the TiVo Server? Seems like that would take all of 2 minutes once or twice a week.


I understand your point that it's not the worst possible bug. But it is actually quite an annoyance for me. I tend to have several windows open with various things, so I have to shut all those down for a reboot, and when the machine comes back up, I have to re-open those programs. I also have some encrypted partitions and I have to put in the passwords for them when the system comes back up.

Also, I have upgraded my TiVo HD to 1TB and sometimes it would be convenient to set it to transfer a lot of programming off the TiVo in one batch. But because of this memory leak, I have to be careful to manually do it in small batches. And I can't just set up automatic transfers and forget about them. It all adds up to quite a bit of pain.

10 or 20 years ago, it was the norm to have to reboot a Windows PC every day or week. But that's no longer the case. Before I installed the TiVo Desktop software, I was going months between reboots. None of the other software I use has a problem like this. The TiVo desktop software really does not meet industry standards with a leak like this.

It also seems to me that TiVo's customer service process is completely broken with respect to the desktop software. TiVo customer service explicitly told me that there's no process for getting a bug report like this from TiVo customer service to whatever engineering department is responsible for maintaining it, whether TiVo's own or some other company's. What kind of a company doesn't have a process for getting bug reports from customer support to someone in engineering who can look into them?


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

Don't believe what the CSR people tell you because most of the time they don't have any information to go on unless it's a common issue (this isn't a TiVo specific problem, but a problem with the entire Customer Support industry).

Yes, there is a memory leak. That's the bad news. The good news is from my testing the TiVoTransfer.exe file will only grow in size while actively transferring programs. Once you stop transferring it won't keep taking up more and more memory, but it won't give back memory it already took.

I've tried clearing the cache, but that doesn't help. It does make TiVo Desktop load faster, but that's it.

Fortunately there is a very easy process to fix the problem. Open a command window and type the following (or automate it with a batch file):

```
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\TiVo Shared\Transfer\TiVoTransfer.exe" /stop
"C:\Program Files\Common Files\TiVo Shared\Transfer\TiVoTransfer.exe" /start
```
For more info and my opinion on this subject see my thread on the subject.


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

morac said:


> Don't believe what the CSR people tell you because most of the time they don't have any information to go on unless it's a common issue (this isn't a TiVo specific problem, but a problem with the entire Customer Support industry).


I agree with you that there are a lot of problems that are widespread through the customer support industry. But there's quite a bit of variability, and in some cases I've found TiVo's customer support to be pretty good.

In the case of the desktop software, though, they're sub-standard. I used to work at a chip company where I developed software to go along with the chips we sold to consumer electronics companies. Long before a product was released, we would develop a plan for handling end-user bug reports with the consumer electronics company. The bug reports were filtered through a couple of layers of the consumer electronics company's CSRs, but there was a process to get them elevated to our application engineers, and if they couldn't solve them to our engineers. There was a sense of urgency about finding and fixing bugs that end users found. TiVo doesn't seem to have any such process for the TiVo desktop software -- or if they do, that process is totally broken.

I noticed that among the companies we sold our chips to, the ones that put more emphasis on fixing bugs reported by their customers were exactly the same companies that were much more successful financially.



morac said:


> Yes, there is a memory leak. That's the bad news. The good news is from my testing the TiVoTransfer.exe file will only grow in size while actively transferring programs. Once you stop transferring it won't keep taking up more and more memory, but it won't give back memory it already took.
> 
> I've tried clearing the cache, but that doesn't help. It does make TiVo Desktop load faster, but that's it.
> 
> ...


Thanks for the tip. I had browsed the threads and seen that there were different scripts that different people used, and hadn't had a chance yet to go through in detail and try to figure out which one to use.

What happens if I run "TiVoTransfer.exe /stop" while I have transfers in progress? Will they resume properly when I start it up again? Or should I clear out my transfer list before stopping and starting TiVoTransfer.exe?



morac said:


> For more info and my opinion on this subject see my thread on the subject.


There's a lot of useful information in that thread. I'm sure glad for all the help provided in these forums. It's way more useful than TiVo's customer service department.


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## samaritan66 (Dec 19, 2006)

morac said:


> Fortunately there is a very easy process to fix the problem. Open a command window and type the following (or automate it with a batch file):
> 
> ```
> "C:\Program Files\Common Files\TiVo Shared\Transfer\TiVoTransfer.exe" /stop
> ...


I think this would be very easy to run as a batch file using "Scheduled Tasks" in Windows. I have my auto-transfers start at 2am. If I had the scheduled task run at 10pm every night, it would give the system 20 hours to finish all my auto-transfers.

This should be more than enough time for my transfers to finish. The real question is what kind of problems would running these two commands give you if you were in the middle of a transfer. I don't have time to test that right now, though.

The only


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## stevel (Aug 23, 2000)

Digital River is not a software producer. As others note, they handle the purchase and delivery of downloadable products. They are a division of a major software distributor.


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

HDChris said:


> What happens if I run "TiVoTransfer.exe /stop" while I have transfers in progress? Will they resume properly when I start it up again? Or should I clear out my transfer list before stopping and starting TiVoTransfer.exe?


Since TiVoTransfer is the program actually doing the transfer if you kill it and start it again you will halt the current transfer, but as the transfer queue is saved on the drive on you PC, it will start transfering again. Since the TiVo doesn't appear capable of resuming though, this means the currently transferring program will need to start over from the beginning. It's also possible that it might confuse the TiVo such that it still thinks it is transferring and prevent any more transfers until it times out or the tivo is restarted (though this doesn't seem likely).

It's probably just a good idea not to kill the TiVoTransfer.exe process while transfers are ongoing since it will just make them take longer, but since there's no chance of causing any permanent damage by doing so, you could test it out and post the results.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

I wish TiVo would overhaul the whole app. The app overall seems bloated. The UI itself is using some custom UI controls instead of using a native interface. It really seems like an archaic implementation.


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

morac said:


> Since TiVoTransfer is the program actually doing the transfer if you kill it and start it again you will halt the current transfer, but as the transfer queue is saved on the drive on you PC, it will start transfering again. Since the TiVo doesn't appear capable of resuming though, this means the currently transferring program will need to start over from the beginning. It's also possible that it might confuse the TiVo such that it still thinks it is transferring and prevent any more transfers until it times out or the tivo is restarted (though this doesn't seem likely).
> 
> It's probably just a good idea not to kill the TiVoTransfer.exe process while transfers are ongoing since it will just make them take longer, but since there's no chance of causing any permanent damage by doing so, you could test it out and post the results.


Well, I tried it. I stopped TiVoTransfer.exe using morac's suggested command. I was in the middle of the transfer of a large file, and I could see the network activity stop in Task Manager after the stop command. Then I used morac's restart command and TiVoTransfer.exe started transferring again. Task Manager shows that TiVoTransfer.exe went back down to very little memory usage after the restart, as advertised. And the file that was in the middle of being transferred started growing again.

I'll wait until the transfer finishes, then look at the file and see if there are any glitches in it, but so far it looks like TiVoTransfer was smart enough to keep track of how much it had transferred and start up there again when it came back up.

Thanks, morac. It looks like this work-around will minimize the effect of the memory leak.


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## jmlight (Oct 6, 2005)

Maybe you can help with another problem - I don't have any issue with the transfer, but I can't get the conversion to work anymore.

The options are there (right-click and then convert to iPod) - but when I make the selection - nothing happens.

I'm wondering if the tivoconverter.exe is corrupt. I'm not sure how to fix it. TIVO gave me the run around and said to contact Digital River. They don't answer.

Which directory should the .exe be in? Perhaps mine has been moved


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## morac (Mar 14, 2003)

Have you tried reinstalling TiVo Desktop?


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## HDChris (Jan 4, 2008)

To follow up on my previous posts:

Starting and stopping the TiVoTransfer.exe process with morac's commands was completely successful. The memory being hogged by TiVoTransfer.exe was released and the program that was partway through being transferred had the transfer re-start and finish successfully. I later deleted the copy on the TiVo and copied back from the PC to the TiVo and watched the episode all the way through and didn't notice any video glitches, so interrupting the transfer this way didn't have any ill effects I could find.

On the Digital River front, I didn't get any response to the web form I submitted to Digital River on Friday until today. Keep in mind that I submitted this at the suggestion of TiVo's customer support department. Finally, today I got an e-mailed response from Digital River:



> Dear Customer,
> 
> Thank you for contacting the TiVo Software Online Store.
> 
> ...


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## MighTiVo (Oct 26, 2000)

HDChris said:


> Finally, the CSR told me (I swear I'm not making this up) that it's Microsoft's problem because otherwise TiVo would be getting ``millions'' of other calls from customers about this -- the CSR said nobody else was having this problem, so it's not a TiVo problem.


I get this whenever I call TiVo support as well. This is why I always suggest that everyone call for things like supporting an external digital TV tuner.

Most people here seem to say that TiVo is aware of the problem and will fix it iof they want to or can but calling isn't going to help, yet the response from CSR seems to always be, we haven't had that many calls on this issue...


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## MighTiVo (Oct 26, 2000)

HDChris said:


> I noticed that among the companies we sold our chips to, the ones that put more emphasis on fixing bugs reported by their customers were exactly the same companies that were much more successful financially.


Be careful with causality here.
Could be that those companies that were much more successful financially had the resources that enabled them to put more emphasis on fixing bugs reported by their customers.


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

MighTiVo said:


> I get this whenever I call TiVo support as well. This is why I always suggest that everyone call for things like supporting an external digital TV tuner.
> 
> Most people here seem to say that TiVo is aware of the problem and will fix it iof they want to or can but calling isn't going to help, yet the response from CSR seems to always be, we haven't had that many calls on this issue...


I agree that is is Tivo desktop code that is taking and not releasing memory as it should but it also ties into the desktop PC/Windows configuration.

I had an older PC with XP and desktop 2.5 and memory leaks pretty routinely on TiVotransfer
I moved on to a new PC with more memory and Vista Home Premium pre-installed and using the same desktop the memory leaks stopped. I also had desktop 2.5 on my XP PC in the kitchen and maybe hada memory leak once in a great while. that stopped altogether with desktop 2.6 on the same PC. I have no idea why and would think it hard thing to figure out and fix for the desktop programmer as well. Not an excuse for Tivo as they should at least better acknowledge the problem and of course do what they can to try and fix it. It may just be though that is a gremlin that shows up in a pattern that is hard to detail and makes it hard to give a reasonable script to a CSR person that may not even know what a memory leak is.


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## HDTiVo (Nov 27, 2002)

ZeoTiVo said:


> hard to give a reasonable script to a CSR person that may not even know what a memory leak is.


How hard is it for a script writer to write, "yeah, we know this type of problem has been reported by others, and TiVo is *working hard on working towards* a solution." 

My impression from what people are posting is the newer version of TD has a worse memory leak problem(s) than the prior one. Is that a fair takeaway?


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## ZeoTiVo (Jan 2, 2004)

HDTiVo said:


> My impression from what people are posting is the newer version of TD has a worse memory leak problem(s) than the prior one. Is that a fair takeaway?


Well not for me. I have had zero memory leak issues with 2.6. I do not hld that up as saying there are no more memory leaks however.

And yes they could use the proverbial 'working hard" but that always seems to upset people more than calm them down


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## TiVo Fool (Dec 17, 2001)

I have significant problems with the TiVoServer process in 2.6.1. I've seen it using up to 950K of memory.


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## rainwater (Sep 21, 2004)

TiVo Fool said:


> I have significant problems with the TiVoServer process in 2.6.1. I've seen it using up to 950K of memory.


950k of memory? That isn't very much. In fact, I have never seen it use that little.


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## TiVo Fool (Dec 17, 2001)

rainwater said:


> 950k of memory? That isn't very much. In fact, I have never seen it use that little.


Sorry, I meant 950MB


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## HDTiVo (Nov 27, 2002)

ZeoTiVo said:


> And yes they could use the proverbial 'working hard" but that always seems to upset people more than calm them down


Primarily because of what it ultimately seems to mean in practice.


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## TiVo Fool (Dec 17, 2001)

*Ridiculous!*


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## Ferd Berfle (Dec 18, 2006)

TiVoServer.exe Was 1.51 GB yesterday (on Dell XPS tower) it had been running about a week. It did have autotransfers on.

But on my Toshiba Satellite TiVoServer.exe was better: ~28 MB -- no autotransfers on.

Both XP Home SP2

So it seems the constantly increasing memory usage (aka memory leak) is platform / configuration specific, which explains why TiVo may not be hearing about it and why some folks don't see it.

I guess I'll do some more poking around and see what I can see and report that to TiVo.


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## gonzotek (Sep 24, 2004)

It's possible it's platform/config specific. It's also possible something in the shared media (photos, music, videos) is triggering the memory issues. I've seen cases in other programs where a corrupt file can cause various kinds of issues, crashed and increased memory usage included. Would anyone be willing to take the time to go through their media collections and test for bad files? There are a few ways to do this: Emptying the folders TiVo Desktop monitors, then adding files back a few at a time until the issue reappears (auto-transfers will complicate this, but the memory issues go back before TD 2.6), and testing the files using software that can report file problems both jump to mind. It might not be easy, and will probably be time-consuming, and it might not even yield any conclusive results, but then again it might.

I'm not suggesting that the files are necessarily to blame, they could be within spec for their respective formats and still have some unique attributes that could cause TD to have trouble. And TD's code could possibly be hardened against problem files. But the issue might be more quickly solved by identifying exactly the circumstances that cause one pc to run smoothly and another to eat up 1,110,772K.


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## kb7oeb (Jan 18, 2005)

I have tivo desktop plus and only use it to auto transfer shows to the computer, convert them to mpeg4 and then delete the original recording. The program will usually get through 2 to 5 recordings before tivoconverter.exe hangs at 99&#37;. This requires that I remove the Hidden flag on the file that is done converting, kill tivoconver.exe and then start another conversion. Usually about this time its time to restart tivoserver because its using about a gig of ram. I shut off my computer daily, it only takes converting files for the problems to appear.

I discovered today the tivo software also likes to eat up virtual memory, I was trying to figure out why windows was expanding my swap file when there was .5gb of ram free and it turned out when I added the vram column to task manager tivotransfer was hogging swap


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## bivrak (Mar 19, 2008)

I found on another thread about this (sorry, can't find it again now to provide link) where someone said it had to do with having a lot of .mpg or .mpeg files in your TiVo home folder that togo and togoback use. I had over 100 GB worth of mpegs in there before I removed them all from mine. Now tivoserver is using about 20 MB of memory and staying on 20 MB. Before I removed them, it would start off small and grow to about 500 MB of memory until I bounced the tivoserver.exe service. I highly recommend anyone who is having this problem try that solution. It's definitely working for me.


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## bivrak (Mar 19, 2008)

I found on another thread about this (sorry, can't find it again now to provide link) where someone said it had to do with having a lot of .mpg or .mpeg files in your TiVo home folder that togo and togoback use. I had over 100 GB worth of mpegs in there before I removed them all from mine. Now tivoserver is using about 20 MB of memory and staying on 20 MB. Before I removed them, it would start off small and grow to about 500 MB of memory until I bounced the tivoserver.exe service. I highly recommend anyone who is having this problem try that solution. It's definitely working for me.


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## Ferd Berfle (Dec 18, 2006)

Quick update, leaving autotransfers off (for last 20+ hours) has stopped the memory growth. It's still pretty large, 116M private bytes, but not incrementing.


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## wblynch (Aug 13, 2003)

Maybe this is why I have never been able to transfer one program from my PC to the Tivo HD. (However, I can get them from Tivo to the PC)

My XP/MCE PC only has 512mb of main memory. I wonder if I increase it to 1gb or 2gb if that will solve the problem.

I admit I never read the minimum system requirements for Tivo Desktop.


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## msmart (Jan 3, 2007)

My server and transfer services always give memory back. Not sure why it's not for others.

Here's a tool I have and use sometimes: *MaxMem* to get back unused memory.


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## TiVo Fool (Dec 17, 2001)

Well I couldn't deal with it any longer and went back to version 2.5.1. 

TiVoServer has been holding steady at 19K for over a week now. That's 2&#37; of the memory that version 2.6.1 was tying up.

Has anyone at TiVo acknowledged this problem with the new version?


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## Injuhneer (Apr 27, 2008)

TiVo Fool said:


> *Ridiculous!*


Ditto. At this moment I am look at WTM and TivoServer is occupying over 
710MB of memory. The really amusing part is that attempts to cycle the process from TiVo Desktop are met with a resource error indicating there is not enough memory to exit or restart the process.

That would be a Catch 22.


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## Aaron Blanchard (Aug 22, 2003)

For what it's worth, I stopped the memory leak by deleting all of my auto-transfers.

Memory usage by the server was bloating to half a GB before the change, and now stays permanently at the level used on start up (26 MB).

ACB


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