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Killing Access
Richard Rost 
          
31 days ago
Well, today marks 2 months since I started my experiment of killing MSACCESS.EXE every couple days instead of having to reboot Windows once a week. I'm pretty confident at this point that the problem is a memory leak inside Access itself.

Two months. Zero problems. Issue solved.

LLAP
RR

P.S. And I'm not saying that Access is completely to blame. It could be something in my own code. This is a database that I've been building and upgrading and modifying since 2002 and there's lots of spaghetti code in it. I'm sure there are object variables that I set and didn't forget. So I'm not saying that it's Access' fault. The problem could be mine, but at least I've come up with a good solution.

Hunting down every questionable bit of code in this database would take weeks, if not months. Plus as I always say, my database is a bit like Scotty's engine room. It normally hums along just fine but in some places I've got wires running around like Christmas tree lights. I'm like the mechanic that drives an old beat-up car because he's constantly tinkering with it. Sure I teach you guys how to build good databases but me from 24 years ago is nowhere near as knowledgeable as me from today.

And I ain't got the time to clean up his mess LOL.

Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago


I love what the AI did with my hair. Not part of the prompt! LOL

Lisa Snider  @Reply  
       
31 days ago
You knocked on wood when you posted this, right?  Murphy's Law you know.
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago
Lisa Indeed! I'm going to let it run until Friday and reboot it anyways. Leaving Sunday for the Microsoft MVP Summit in WA, so I don't want to deal with having to reboot it while I'm gone. LOL
Donald Blackwell  @Reply  
       
31 days ago
When I first glanced at the picture, you almost looked like Q. I guess that makes you the omnipotent Access developer, bending databases to your will with the snap, err, tap, of a key.
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago
So the above image is from Gemini (Google) who is leading the AI image generation contest between itself and GPT. Here are the images that GPT created. A lot darker and I must say a lot more violent. LOL...
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago

Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago

Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago
Donald yeah, I kinda thought that at first glance too. LOL. I gave the AI the famous pic of Riker and Picard firing on that alien worm creature inside of Commander Remmick in the first season finale...
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
31 days ago

Thomas Gonder  @Reply  
      
31 days ago
Care to share the symptoms of your Access problem, that requires you to shutdown?
Most of my crashes are during development with changes VBA code or even changing table field definitions.
The symptoms are, a slight pause, and then it goes straight to doing a backup, or a complete hang without any indication it happened on a line of code. Sometimes it happens with my Menu form running, and other times not, so I'm never sure if it's VBA or just some internal corruption of the Access internals.
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
30 days ago
Thomas This is on a computer running Windows 10 or 11 with an Access database that runs in a loop 24/7. It handles things like sending emails, checking customer service requests, approving Forum posts, those kinds of non-critical tasks. In the past, if I didn't reboot the machine at least once a week, I would start getting "out of stack space" or "out of memory" errors. I always assumed Windows was the culprit, so for the past ten years or so I've just been rebooting the system weekly.

Recently I had the idea to simply kill the MSACCESS.EXE process instead. Since I started doing that, the problem has completely gone away. So there's clearly a memory leak somewhere in Access. It could very well be something in my own code, but this database has grown so large and Frankenstein-like over the years that tracking down the exact source of the leak would be a massive project. It could be something simple like recordsets not getting cleaned up properly.

At this point, restarting the Access process a couple of times a week fixes the issue, so I'm perfectly happy with that solution. After my nightly back up on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I issue a command to kill Access and then restart the database and everything has been working great for two months now.
Thomas Gonder  @Reply  
      
30 days ago
I've had the out of stack space happen when I've hit recursive errors in my run-time-error routines.
I had to add On error goto 0 in my RTE procedures, or sometimes setting another RTE routine to catch those.
Richard Rost OP  @Reply  
          
30 days ago
Yeah, endless loops and recursion out of control will cause that. Pretty sure that's not it. It's probably just lots of small functions and subs that I declare objects in and don't clear them. They'll add up over days of endless looping.
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