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CAD Forums => Vertically Challenged => Topic started by: paulmcz on February 03, 2006, 12:53:11 PM

Title: Heap Error
Post by: paulmcz on February 03, 2006, 12:53:11 PM
Anyone knows what causes "Heap Error" and/or how to avoid it?
It happens in Mech. Desktop while working on a single part. The file is about 800K. I can progress on it bit by bit, saving it every 2 minutes but still, it catches up, I get "Heap Error" and it aborts. It's very annoying.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Paul.
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: MickD on February 03, 2006, 05:39:01 PM
Have you tried a recover or audit on the drawing, this could correct the file structure and may fix the problem.

If that doesn't work, have a look at your memory usage on the processes tab in the task manager (ctrl+alt+del) when you start your app do some work and before it crashes while you work, try different commands and watch for the mem usage rising steadily. If this happens you may have a memory leak but it would be unusual for a 'stable' product to just start doing that.
Do you have any custom objects?
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: paulmcz on February 03, 2006, 08:15:47 PM
Hi Mick,
Thanks for your response.
Audit and recovery didn't find anything, didn't do anything.
As you advised, I was watching the memory and as you said, just before the crash, unused memory dropped down to near 0. Shortly after that it crashed with memory hitting zero level. This is on W98SE with Mech. Desktop 2.0. When I work in XP, with the same MD, it is running smooth and no crashing. Do you think it could be the W98 not being able to handle too much memory (1GB)?
How do you stop memory leak?
Thanks,
Paul.
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: MickD on February 03, 2006, 08:39:54 PM
How do you stop memory leak?
Thanks,
Paul.

By writing better software :D

Seriously though, it may be something with 98/xp and MFC or something, 1 gig should be ample. Does your memory disappear on XP, even slowly?

Other members have reported similar behaviour with other verticals (or even vanilla) where a 'minimize' window and restore retrieved a lot of memory back, this is a user interface problem where the developers are not handling resources correctly or the UI library is faulty. These problems are subtle and hard bugs to find, especially in development when they are not using the app as much as the end user would, it may even be MFC that has the slight bug (which may have been fixed in xp?).

The bottom line though is it can't be fixed by the end user, it has to be fixed by the developers.

Cheers,
Mick
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: paulmcz on February 03, 2006, 08:58:29 PM

The problem never happened before I had installed additional memory. Even when working on much larger file.
The memory drops in both (XP an W98) when program is loading. After that it gets leveled off. Only with the case of crash in W98, memory suddenly drops. In XP it is pretty steady.

Thanks Mick.
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: Chuck Gabriel on February 03, 2006, 09:21:17 PM
Windows 98 requires a registry hack to handle more than 512 MB of RAM without vomitting.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912/en-us
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: paulmcz on February 03, 2006, 11:03:26 PM
Windows 98 requires a registry hack to handle more than 512 MB of RAM without vomitting.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912/en-us

When I first installed the memory, W98 did "vomit". It could't start in other than in safe mode. I fixed it with one of the option listed in the link you posted. It started to work but apparently, there is still a problem. I'll try one of the other options and see how it goes.
Thanks.
Title: Re: Heap Error
Post by: Chuck Gabriel on February 04, 2006, 10:37:34 AM
Yeah.  I thought that particular problem probably would have become apparent long before you even got mech desktop running, but I figured it might be worth a shot.  Sorry it didn't help.