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splwow64.exe leaking handles

Posted: Thu Jul 16, 2009 12:30 pm
by pesenti
I have the server version for 64-bit installed on a Windows 2003 x64 server in VMWare. The conversion runs pretty well except that splwow64.exe seems to accumulate handles at a very fast rate (after a few thousand conversions it has 8 million handles!!!) and then I think it crashes and restarts, at which point p2fserver is very likely to hang. Is there a way to avoid this behavior?

Re: splwow64.exe leaking handles

Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 8:31 am
by colindean
pesenti and I are still encountering this problem when printing a very large number of documents. After approximately 4,000 documents, the handle count for splwow64.exe was nearly 6,000,000. This is obviously not desirable behavior, but seeing as though splwow64.exe is likely where the problem may be, is there a workaround for this?

We investigated MSFT KB 968585 "A handle leak occurs in the print spooler service after you resubmit a print job to a shared printer on which the "Keep printed documents" option is enabled". However, the conditions of it indicate that its described behavior occurs when the printer is shared on the network and "keep printed documents" is enabled. The Print2Flash printer on our server is not shared, and, unless it's checked by default, "keep printed documents" is not enabled. We'll likely try to apply the hotfix nonetheless, but feel that it is unlikely to address our problem.

What can be done to address this? At the moment, we're still using a batch process and not the OLE API. As this problem seems to occur during the actual printing, I would think that it wouldn't matter which interface to Print2Flash we're using, unless the P2F Service specifically addresses this problem in some way.

Ideas?