What is memory leak, page fault and how they affect LoadRunner performance?

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Filed under: introduction, load testing 

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Memory-Leak

Continuing with our discussion on technical terms used in loadrunner, we will now see the meaning of memory leak and page fault and how they affect loadrunner performance .

What is memory leak?

A memory leak is a particular type of unintentional memory consumption by a computer program where the program fails to release memory when no longer needed. This condition is normally the result of a bug in a program that prevents it from freeing up memory that it no longer needs.This term has the potential to be confusing, since memory is not physically lost from the computer. Rather, memory is allocated to a program, and that program subsequently loses the ability to access it due to program logic flaws.

What is a page fault?

An interrupt that occurs when a program requests data that is not currently in real memory. The interrupt triggers the operating system to fetch the data from a virtual memory and load it into RAM.

An invalid page fault or page fault error occurs when the operating system cannot find the data in virtual memory. This usually happens when the virtual memory area, or the table that maps virtual addresses to real addresses, becomes corrupt.

Now the most important question comes up, how do they affect LoadRunner functioning?

As you might guess, memory leak, if left unattended and not corrected, could prove to be fatal. Memory leaks can be found out by running tests for long duration (say about an hour) and continuously checking memory usage.

Issues caused by memory leaks are essentially based on two variable for a standalone windows application 1) Frequency of usage 2) size of memory leak . If either one or both are very high it could cause the computer to come to a point when no memory is available for other applications causing it to crash. If it is a network based application then you will also have to consider network traffic . If each network transaction causes a memory leak , then a high volume of network transactions could also prove dangerous.

References:
Wiki
Webopedia

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Comments

4 Comments on What is memory leak, page fault and how they affect LoadRunner performance?

  1. Rajiv on Thu, 16th Apr 2009 11:41 pm

    2. Hello,

    Good Informations on how memory leak and Page fault affects the Performance of a server.

    Pl keep on posting valuable informations.

    Thanks,
    Rajiv

  2. Ankur on Fri, 17th Apr 2009 2:13 pm

    3. Thanks Rajiv!

  3. Ritesh on Thu, 18th Jun 2009 12:42 pm

    4. Hi Ankur,

    I’m facing the memory leakage problem. While running the scripts i get ‘Out of memory’ error.
    I have opted discriptive programming.
    I’m using ‘.ini’ files to pass the value to the parameters.
    But i’m also using some variable inside the script to get the ROProperty
    Is there a way to free up the memory used by these variables?(during runtime)

    Thanks,
    Ritesh

  4. Hk on Fri, 18th Sep 2009 5:02 pm

    5. Dear friends,
    Can any one share knw on Graphs.
    1) Hits per
    2) transaction resp graph
    3) Throughput graph
    4) Error graph etc

    Please explain with graphs.

    Thanks
    HK

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