February 1st, 2008

Strange bug assignment: Programs are using too much memory

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

My office is in the same hallway as the programmer and program manager responsible for the Processes tab in Task Manager. (Of course, they are responsible for a bunch of other stuff too; it’s not like 100% of their days are dedicated to Task Manager!) I happened to be passing by just as this particular bug popped up on their radar. It went something like this:

Problem: Task Manager reporting programs are using too much memory

Steps to reproduce:

  • Start up the system and run some programs.
  • Run Task Manager.
  • Go to the Process tab.
  • Look at the Memory Usage column.

Result: The numbers are too big!

Expected result: Less memory usage.

Apparently, it’s Task Manager’s fault that other programs are using lots of memory. Maybe we should just take the values and divide them by two, just to make things look better.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Other

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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