5 ms·

Just enabling the Handles column made me realize that the "Asus Update Service" SysTray Icon/application had a handle leak: as it had 64K handles open. There's

Just enabling the Handles column made me realize that the "Asus Update Service" SysTray Icon/application had a handle leak: as it had 64K handles open. There's also an Asus Lighting Service that still has 10K handles open.

pixl97 5y ago
This doesn't surprise me at all. Vendor tools, like the ASUS utilities, or Dells update application, and many others are commonly outsourced from different companies and seem to import a string of security flaws. Providing the program, not providing a secure program tends to be the metric for delivery on these applications.
goldenkey 5y ago
Just for others who may not see where the handles column is: "Open task manager, go to details tab, right click on one of the already listed columns, click select columns, then scroll down to check handles." After sorting by handles, I see similar results. Logitech Hub Agent has 13,000 handles. It seems these gaming companies hire the worst coders without care for actual performance. Yet...they advertise their products as cutting edge performance. Quite the irony.
- fullstop 5y ago
  I get the feeling that gaming PCs are restarted often.
  - Arrath 5y ago
    Not remotely true, in my personal case. I might change that stance when I get home tonight and check for leaks like this, though.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Another two good utilities to use is performance monitor, and process explorer. Perf mon is good for showing usage over time with its built in graphing and recording.
- taneq 5y ago
  > It seems these gaming companies hire the worst coders without care for actual performance. Yet...they advertise their products as cutting edge performance. Quite the irony. Unfortunately gaming companies routinely hire inexperienced coders because they're cheap. By the time those coders have skilled up, they've been burned by the gaming industry in one of the many ways that the gaming industry burns coders, and so they no longer work in gamedev.
bluedino 5y ago
It seemed like in the old days you had to read the Petzold book to learn Windows programming. It actually explained what was going on underneath the hood. And if you wanted more, you'd read something by Jeffrey Richter, David Solomon, or Mark Russinovich. Now? You watch a couple YouTube videos, or perhaps a terrible Apress book. You get something to appear on the page, and viola!, you're a programmer.
- ripley12 5y ago
  There’s a real problem here: those are still the books to read if you really want to understand Windows. They’re great books but they’re old, often out of print, and the onus is on the reader to distinguish outdated info from still-relevant info. Yet as far as I can tell, nobody’s publishing better books about Windows programming today. It’s remarkably hard in 2021 for a newbie to start learning Windows programming “properly”.
  - no_time 5y ago
    It's because MS treats win32 (or how ever you want to call the "legacy" api) like the plague despite it being the past,present and arguably the future. I still can't name a single UWP app that isnt a crude mockery of some win32 app that runs circles around it in both performance and UI design. My favorite example of how this new generation of MS devs handle performance: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
    - ripley12 5y ago
      I think that’s an unfair characterization of the Terminal issue you linked, and the Terminal developers in general. If you follow the Terminal repo it is clear that the devs are not fans of the “modern” Windows technologies they are forced to work with.
po1nter 5y ago
I just did this and I'm surprised to see DropBox with 19K handles. Even more than Visual Studio at 4.5K handles. Handle type summary: <Unknown type> : 4 <Unknown type> : 2 <Unknown type> : 332 ALPC Port : 19 Desktop : 2 Directory : 4 Event : 395 File : 131 IoCompletion : 55 IRTimer : 11 Job : 3 Key : 104 Mutant : 21 Process : 66 Section : 45 Semaphore : 18109 Thread : 154 TpWorkerFactory : 5 WaitCompletionPacket: 70 WindowStation : 3 Total handles: 19535
mook 5y ago
"Process Hacker" can sometimes display more information as well; for example, I see that igfxEM.exe on my machine (Intel graphics driver) is leaking around 5000 handles to the registry key HLKM\system\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{5c4c3332-344d-483c-8739-259e934c9cc8}\0001 over a week of uptime…

pixl97 5y ago

This doesn't surprise me at all. Vendor tools, like the ASUS utilities, or Dells update application, and many others are commonly outsourced from different companies and seem to import a string of security flaws. Providing the program, not providing a secure program tends to be the metric for delivery on these applications.

goldenkey 5y ago

Just for others who may not see where the handles column is: "Open task manager, go to details tab, right click on one of the already listed columns, click select columns, then scroll down to check handles." After sorting by handles, I see similar results. Logitech Hub Agent has 13,000 handles. It seems these gaming companies hire the worst coders without care for actual performance. Yet...they advertise their products as cutting edge performance. Quite the irony.

fullstop 5y ago
I get the feeling that gaming PCs are restarted often.
- Arrath 5y ago
  Not remotely true, in my personal case. I might change that stance when I get home tonight and check for leaks like this, though.
sumtechguy 5y ago
Another two good utilities to use is performance monitor, and process explorer. Perf mon is good for showing usage over time with its built in graphing and recording.
taneq 5y ago
> It seems these gaming companies hire the worst coders without care for actual performance. Yet...they advertise their products as cutting edge performance. Quite the irony. Unfortunately gaming companies routinely hire inexperienced coders because they're cheap. By the time those coders have skilled up, they've been burned by the gaming industry in one of the many ways that the gaming industry burns coders, and so they no longer work in gamedev.

bluedino 5y ago

It seemed like in the old days you had to read the Petzold book to learn Windows programming. It actually explained what was going on underneath the hood. And if you wanted more, you'd read something by Jeffrey Richter, David Solomon, or Mark Russinovich. Now? You watch a couple YouTube videos, or perhaps a terrible Apress book. You get something to appear on the page, and viola!, you're a programmer.

ripley12 5y ago
There’s a real problem here: those are still the books to read if you really want to understand Windows. They’re great books but they’re old, often out of print, and the onus is on the reader to distinguish outdated info from still-relevant info. Yet as far as I can tell, nobody’s publishing better books about Windows programming today. It’s remarkably hard in 2021 for a newbie to start learning Windows programming “properly”.
- no_time 5y ago
  It's because MS treats win32 (or how ever you want to call the "legacy" api) like the plague despite it being the past,present and arguably the future. I still can't name a single UWP app that isnt a crude mockery of some win32 app that runs circles around it in both performance and UI design. My favorite example of how this new generation of MS devs handle performance: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
  - ripley12 5y ago
    I think that’s an unfair characterization of the Terminal issue you linked, and the Terminal developers in general. If you follow the Terminal repo it is clear that the devs are not fans of the “modern” Windows technologies they are forced to work with.

po1nter 5y ago

I just did this and I'm surprised to see DropBox with 19K handles. Even more than Visual Studio at 4.5K handles. Handle type summary: <Unknown type> : 4 <Unknown type> : 2 <Unknown type> : 332 ALPC Port : 19 Desktop : 2 Directory : 4 Event : 395 File : 131 IoCompletion : 55 IRTimer : 11 Job : 3 Key : 104 Mutant : 21 Process : 66 Section : 45 Semaphore : 18109 Thread : 154 TpWorkerFactory : 5 WaitCompletionPacket: 70 WindowStation : 3 Total handles: 19535

mook 5y ago

"Process Hacker" can sometimes display more information as well; for example, I see that igfxEM.exe on my machine (Intel graphics driver) is leaking around 5000 handles to the registry key HLKM\system\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{5c4c3332-344d-483c-8739-259e934c9cc8}\0001 over a week of uptime…