Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Memory Leaks and RADAR in Windows....

If you're going through Windows or using the Registry Editor and come across a listing for RADAR, it isn't what you think.... here's the story:

RADAR is a memory leak detection technology built into Windows 7 and 8 and integrated with Watson (error reporting) and AutoBug (automatic bug filing). It allows Microsoft product teams and third parties to discover and fix memory leaks early in the product cycle and after release. Since RADAR runs on customer machines, leaks can be caught during public betas, after release, and by third parties, thus ridding the entire ecosystem of memory leaks. RADAR-shipped components are highly optimized to have no appreciable performance impact.

"And what are Memory Leaks?" you ask......

A memory leak occurs when a process allocates memory from the paged or nonpaged pools, but does not free the memory. As a result, these limited pools of memory are depleted over time, causing Windows to slow down. If memory is completely depleted, failures may result.

Normally, when a process or program uses memory (RAM) during its operations, it releases that block of memory as the program or process ends, but if it doesn't, then there's a problem, which ought to result in a bug report, and an eventual fix. With RADAR, that is mostly automated. And all of that helps to explain why the newer versions of Windows are better than old ones.

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