Handles are killing your PC? I looked at mine and

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Apr 18, 2018 1:35PM PDT

From Stadock's newsletter I read "Handles are killing your PC" and checked in on the apps and handles to discover the stock Killer Network app was way out there at over 906,000 (906 THOUSAND) handles. This was a pretty interesting find and had me off to the maker for latest suite and drivers.

Result? The 906,000 number dropped to 900 handles or a thousand fold less.

Here's the full text of the message and link.
"Handles are killing your PC

The handle issue is a pretty big deal, and you may never have even heard of them. Let's fix that.

Right now, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc. Go to the Performance tab. You will see the word "Handles" over on the right. On Windows 10, you should boot with around 60,000 handles used. This is actually pretty bad, but no biggie.

But, many people are starting to run enough programs to get over 100,000. And at around 120,000 handles... bad things start to happen. Your PC will get slow. Graphical elements might not show up. Programs may not launch. Long before you run out of memory, you will likely run out of handles - it's a problem that Microsoft really needs to fix.

So, what can you do?

Click on the "Details" tab. Now, right click on the name column, choose "Select Columns," and then choose "Handles." Now sort the list of processes by handles. Anything using more than 5,000 is not good (unless it's a game). But, keep an eye on anything using lots of handles and you should be fine."

Stardock didn't publish this except in their newsletter so here's a forum discussion about this issue.
https://forums.stardock.com/427418/do-handles-matter-in-win7

Discussion is locked

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Handles

by Bob__B Apr 18, 2018 5:44PM PDT

I suspect that part of this problem is msft does not know what you want to do with the machine.

So the OS comes with everything enabled and unneeded products installed.

It's up to the user to trim down the machine to what they need.

Uninstall unneeded stuff, turn off features, make that startup list skinny etc.

This w7 machine with FF and my AV looking at the forums shows 11K handles....it bounces around a little.

In the years that I have had it I have never seen an issue with crashes/slow downs/unresponsive.

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I'll add I didn't see any crash.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Apr 19, 2018 9:22AM PDT

I did have an odd slowdown that I think this may be related to but you can imagine that an Acer Predator laptop with the usual current gen i7 16GB DDR4, SSD and very clean as most moderators run their PCs that this would have to be very over the top to see any issue.

So when I read about subjects like this I always want to give it a look. And I was pretty surprised what I found. At over 900K handles it was giving some impact and a new set of drivers and apps for this device did give a 1000 fold decrease so there was something going on there.

But no crashes. I did get an unresponsive PC effect that would pass after a minute but research so far didn't find a thing.

We'll see if this area helps folk like me and others.

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Handles

by Bob__B Apr 19, 2018 10:19AM PDT

I'll admit I don't know a thing about handles.

It was just a number that I could see bounce around depending on the app or combo of apps I was running.

Min/max/negative effect no idea.

I try to keep the machine lean and use the proper bios and drivers.

So far that seems to work.

After reading the article if I saw a large number of handles I might be off on a hunt.

Thanks for the tip.

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Put on your lab coat. We're going in.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Apr 19, 2018 10:39AM PDT

"Any process that has more than a ten thousand handles open at any given point in time is likely either poorly designed or has a handle leak, so a limit of 16 million is essentially infinite..."
- https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2009/09/29/pushing-the-limits-of-windows-handles/

Later he reveals we can use 4,096 bytes as to what to estimate for RAM use per handle. So that 910K+ handle usage ate 3,727,360,000 or just under 4GB of RAM. While we do have very nice machines at the office, this is an obvious thing to fix.

Why I posted it is I'm getting a few PCs that don't budge on performance and I'm keeping an eye out for new areas to check.

Handles are killing your PC? I looked at mine and

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