I had my first out of memory experience running on 2GB of RAM while not running a linear algebra model this afternoon. No, I don't use a swap file.

A quick check showed that NVidia was to blame, using hundreds of megs of memory over a number of different processes, nSvcIp.exe being highest on the list with (currently) 325,808K of memory usage.

What? How can anyone allow their code to use this much RAM? As a programmer I cringe at ever buying NVidia products again! Obviously I am highly upset.

Does anyone have a fix? This is a server system -- I cannot allow such horrible code to steal all the RAM on my server. And disabling firewall logs is *NOT* a solution! It looks like I will have to buy an extra hardware firewall, at extra cost to me -- money that I already spent on the NVidia MoBo because... it had a hardware firewall.

NVidia? Is there a fix in the works? Why was this allowed into the wild with such a blatent memory leak?

Thank you,
Geoff Granum

I assume you meant nForce4 rather than GeForce 4?

What mobo are you using? Also what OS?

What version of NVIDIA software?

If you are having trouble with the NF4 firewall aka NAM, there are several threads in this forum dealing with NAM problems which may provide ideas if not guidance.

While running the Nvidia nic I usually had task manager running too, but I never saw memory usage like you experienced!
There was another thread (maybe on Ars) where someone else was running 1 gig ram
w/o a swap file and had problems.
Perhaps those fine, fine people at MS can shed some light on swapfile code?

Ack. Sorry, yes, NForce. Stupid mistake.

MoBo: Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
WinXP Pro SP2 with SSDP *DISABLED*
As to NVidia:
Build Version: 4.68
Framework Version: 01.00
Component Version: 02.02

Had to use the version 6.xx of the global installer package (grrr) downloaded from the NVidia site (recent, yesterday). Doing so didn't update the firewall, it seems. Bloody hard to tell.


I looked at those threads, as well as googled for the task name (Before posting) and was disappointed to find no answer. Admittedly, I found few complaints of memory leaks, either, although there were a few.

The simple fact is that no background process should ever, for any reason, use 25% of your RAM *unless it is a primary process*. E.g. MySQL is free to soak me for up to 100% of my system resources -- as would be Apache or Tomcat. Those are server processes and are assumed to expand as needed. Not so a *hardware* firewall. I suppose if I were actually running a data rate of a few hundred Mbps through the system, sure, I would expect the firewall to use some serious RAM -- although that would be at the system level... would that RAM usage even SHOW UP in memory manager? I don't think so --- should be working at the same level as video shared memory: It would just disappear off of the stack and windows wouldn't bother to tell you where it went. And it still wouldn't be 300MB -- Cisco systems using that much RAM are handling Gbps, not mere Mbps.

Does anyone know which processes I can safely kill and still have the firewall running? I know I don't need the extra Apache process; I'll just use command line edits. Ditto the system tray icon...


Thanks for the tips, and the pointer,
Geoff

I had this problem. Mainly when using P2P softwares. The problem is with a service called IAM (Intelligent Application Manager) which is basically the main firewall service.

I'm having the same problem.

Board: Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
O/S: WinXP Home SP2
Framework Version: 01.00
Component Version: 02.02

Gig of ram. Utilization exceeds physical after about a week. Culprit is always nSvcIp.

For my purposes, it's only an annoyance, but I could do w/o the weekly reboot. System's been stable otherwise.

I had the same problem with that app bloating in memory too, and thats on top of the 50 or so meg that the misc. firewall apps eat from the start.

look the firewall is garbage, alpha quality software on alpha quality hardware
get over it, move on , get that firewall off your machines.

When I first got My nforce4 board (asus a8n-sli deluxe) in january I noticed that under the right circumstances that I could crash my computer by hard reseting my linksys router. (I removed the rest of this paragraph I dont want to get the wrong people excited but lets just say I can still crash my comptuter useing the nvidia nic under the right circumstances and if I can figure it out someone not so nice out there somewhere can figure it out too, you do the math.)


I can''t understand why with the many hundreds of topics and discussions on the internet about the pitfalls of this firewall people are still trying to use it, especially with the total absence of publicly available driver and software updates from the manufacturer.

i had the same problem with my mo it wont work on IAM program
mine is a foxconnhttp://forums.nvidia.com/style_images/nzone/folder_post_icons/icon7.gif
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java script:emoticon(':blink:')
smilie how do i solve this.

If you look in the appropriate ETHERNET folder under C:\NVIDIA\ there should be a NAM folder with a NAMSetup.exe which you can run to get a newer version of NAM and nForce Firewall. Hard to say if it already updated the firewall.



I don't think there's anything you can kill and still have the Firewall, though in the NAMSetup install you get a choice as to which components to install. You know, with all the problems people have had with it, it's generally recommended to not install the NForce Firewall. You'd probably be better off with ZoneAlarm - the hardware offloading of nForce networking is notoriously unreliable, e.g. with Eudora, so there's no gain from their Firewall.

Forceware 6.86 removes the firewall from NAM, so it is now useless. Even in the older versions there is a bug that corrupts data when hardware offloading (ActiveArmor) is enabled.

I suggest you find yourself an alternative, I have given up on NAM.

If you really want to, there is a debug level driver that was made by nVIDIA that has the corruption fix. It was never released publicly, but they gave it to an end-user who was working directly with them. The thread is somewhere in the nVIDIA drivers section of nforcershq.com

Sooo... how the hell do I fix this crap?