CS3 and Com Surrogate are using all my RAM

metalliandy

Hey all,

I tried searching for this but didnt come up with much.

Over the past few days i have been working with a 4096x2048 image in CS3 and everything goes smoothly until all of a sudden all my RAM gets eaten.
When i look in Task Manager it says that CS3 is using 1.84GB (more than the 1.79GB allotted in the preferences) and that COM Surrogate is using 5.5GB.

It seems that a memory leak is also causing CS3 to keep RAM even though i have closed the .psd and no images are open in Photoshop.


I have looked around and some people say that Nero or DivX can cause this sometimes, but i dont have either installed on my system :S

Does anyone have any idea what else could cause this?


My system is the following:-


Vista Home Premium Home SP2 (x64)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ @ 2800 MHz
8GB DDR2 RAM (4 x 2048 )
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX (190.62 Drivers)

The only things i have running when using CS3 are the folder with the textures im working on, Marmoset and sometimes my texture folder with photos etc.


Thanks for looking guys

arrangemonk

The dllhost.exe process goes by the name COM Surrogate and the only time you're likely even to notice its existence is when it crashes and you get the message COM Surrogate has stopped working. What is this COM Surrogate and why does it keep crashing?

The COM Surrogate is a fancy name for Sacrificial process for a COM object that is run outside of the process that requested it. Explorer uses the COM Surrogate when extracting thumbnails, for example. If you go to a folder with thumbnails enabled, Explorer will fire off a COM Surrogate and use it to compute the thumbnails for the documents in the folder. It does this because Explorer has learned not to trust thumbnail extractors; they have a poor track record for stability. Explorer has decided to absorb the performance penalty in exchange for the improved reliability resulting in moving these dodgy bits of code out of the main Explorer process. When the thumbnail extractor crashes, the crash destroys the COM Surrogate process instead of Explorer.

In other words, the COM Surrogate is the I don't feel good about this code, so I'm going to ask COM to host it in another process. That way, if it crashes, it's the COM Surrogate sacrificial process that crashes instead of me process. And when it crashes, it just means that Explorer's worst fears were realized.

In practice, if you get these types of crashes when browsing folders containing video or media files, the problem is most likely a flaky codec.

its related to broken codecs, find and delete them and youre fine again

metalliandy

Thanks for the arrangemonk

It looks like MysticThumbs is the problem.
When explorer tries to create a thumbnail for the .psd the memory gets drained.

I have contacted the author and hopefully he will be able to fix it.

Thanks again

arrangemonk

erm, photoshop usually ceates thumbnails by itself, you shoulnd had installed the psd thumbnail extension

metalliandy

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to anymore :S
Im not sure when it stopped either, i think it might be that im using vista 64 though.

See this thread for more info.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=56159&highlight=tga+vista

xamy

I'm the same boat metalliandy,

and it all started on the same day as with you!
I am also using mysticthumbs but uninstalling didn't help at all.
I suspect a corrupt / bad Windows Update that messed things up with photoshop, as of now, I still haven't figured out how to fix it. The next thing will be to reinstalling CS3.