The Glade 4.0

I was wondering if anyone knew where to start troubleshooting a very strange problem I've been having for about a year. My League of Legends client will start running very slowly after about 2 hours or so of the laptop running. This seems to be pretty consistent regardless if it was idling, downloading something or whatever. It seems if you leave it on for 2 hours, the client will drop to an unplayable 2 or 3 fps. It's very abrupt and doesn't seem to be heat related. The only way to "fix" it is to reboot.

Are there any process monitors I could get that might show the initiation of something? It's also ONLY for the LoL client which seems really odd.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Sounds like a classic memory leak to me. Only happens with one application, and usually after a set period of time? Probably a shitty client.

Yea, the game is horribly written. The matchmaking part of the client is written in Adobe Air (gag) and the actual game itself usually takes 800k memory.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Windows 7 "Resource Monitor" on the Memory tab might help track it down.

Sounds like you already know what the source of the problem is though?.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Check handles too. You can add handles and a bunch of other stuff to the task manager. Go to View and click on Select Columns. I tracked down an issue with a crap IBM software product where it was dropping 3 handles every second, and eventually it would run out and crash the server.

I've tracked all the processes running to see if any execute or start using more resources but I haven't noted anything. I'm guessing it's internal to LoL since it's the thing affected

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk 2

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Unless you know a lot about Windows internals, trying to specifically debug something like this is probably out of the question. Even then, it would have to be an exercise in reverse engineering without access to the LoL client source code and a debug build.

For your purposes, I would recommend Process Explorer from the Sysinternals Suite (now absorbed by Microsoft). It's probably the most thorough general-purpose task manager available on Windows.

Another useful tool might be perfmon.exe, which I believe ships with Win 7. It's pretty much the way to go if you want to profile process or system metrics, since it uses the system profiling API to get high-precision timer data, etc. Just be aware that in order to do its thing, perfmon has to enable a bunch of process and thread accounting ... stuff... in the kernel which doesn't normally run. In other words, having perfmon running will itself degrade system performance. Generally speaking, the more counters you have running, the worse it will get.

There are even deeper tools in the Sysinternals Suite toolset (like procmon) but as I said, you at least need general familiarity with the Windows API to even roughly grok its output. Supposing that you first built up a reasonable case for a memory leak using high level tools like procexp and perfmon, you might be able to use procmon to hone in on exactly which thread was leaking memory, so that you could report back something more specific and helpful to the developers than just "I think you're leaking memory".

Your problem does sound like a memory leak except for one thing that strikes me as odd. It shouldn't be necessary to reboot if all that's going on is a user space memory leak. Once you kill the process, any and all pages allocated to it are reaped by the Windows heap manager. That is, you get the leaked memory back. The only way that a process could leak memory beyond its lifetime is if it's leaking kernel memory. Does the LoL client install a kernel component? I can't imagine why it would, but other than a bug in the Windows kernel itself or a kernel module (i.e. "driver" in Windows parlance), that's the only plausible way it could leak kernel memory. I mean, I'm as cynical about Windows as the next guy, but this isn't Windows 95. Also, if it is a kernel memory leak that persists beyond program life, it wouldn't just be the LoL client that slows down. Once physical memory is exhausted, the entire system should come to a crawl until the next reboot.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.