Iexplore.exe very high memory usage up to 1,500,000 KB

Hello,

I administer many Windows XP Pro SP 3 machines and have noticed something very bizarre happening over the past two weeks. Quite a few users started complaining that their machines were running slowly and upon further examination, I discovered that the culprit was iexplore.exe consuming approx 1,100,000 KB to 1,500,000 KB of memory under the processes tab in task manager. If you end the process, the issue goes away but eventually comes back in a few hours (maybe half a workday). These machines are running a mixture of IE 7 and IE 8. Does anyone have any clue about what to do from here? Thanks for the advice.

Edited by Pmeadows123, 07 October 2010 - 10:40 AM.

Try running IE in safe mode: How to troubleshoot compatibility problems that affect Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista?

Ok I'll try that.

One more thing to mention is that many users are getting out of memory on line: xx error messages in IE. One specific site that they see this on is www.theice.com

Yeah test without addon's that will be a good starting point.

I tried running process explorer on a machine that was showing the high memory symptoms and digging deeper into iexplore.exe (see above screenshot). I noticed that the user had a wsi weather site open along with cbs sportsline (both use flash player). I disabled the flash add-on and went back to those sites to see if the memory spiked and it didn't. The weird thing is that the issue occurs over a period of time so it's not immediately noticeable. Since the user needs flash, I reenabled and downgraded the version of flash to 10.1.53.64 from 10.1.85.3 to see if that helps. I will followup with him tomorrow and see if the memory is still spiking.

I would highly advice against using an outdated version of flash you are just asking for trouble if you do.

I understand that and I was concerned about that as well. However, these guys are constantly coming to my desk saying that they can't work and I don't have any fix for the issue unfortunately. I have opened a bug fix ticket with adobe to see if they find anything.

Can you do the following on each machine:

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these guys are constantly coming to my desk saying that they can't work

Would you post a list of all processes running with process explorer?

I try to minimize the play apps/plugins installed like toolbars etc? on work computers.

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/MEXu3FyU7Um05wPBPcDAqN9

Your computers are well specced, so it must be a process thing maybe a virus scanner.

Perform what DaChew suggested.

Process Explorer

Edited by Pmeadows123, 08 October 2010 - 10:05 AM.

Yeah they are. This is in fact one of our crappier Dell machines! We run HP workstation class machines for the most part xw6400 xw6600s with dual xeon processors and 4GB of RAM.

How do you use Citirix? Is it a web based tool?

These guys connect to outside parties citrix systems and just use the online web plug in with IE. Not all of them use it but it is on the master images just in case they need it.

They also use gotomypc for remote access back to their workstations.

Edited by Pmeadows123, 08 October 2010 - 10:35 AM.