How to Enable User Mode Stack Trace Database for IMA Service to Detect Memory Leaks

Tuesday, 05 July 2005 by Michel Roth

Symptoms
Users may experience IMA service leaking memory and heap expansion: ImaSrv.exe process consumes more than 100 MB. Sometimes it can be even 500 MB or 1.5 GB.

Cause
Heap expansion (memory leak) results from some components not freeing dynamically allocated heap memory. Over time it results in process growth in memory, slow operation, and eventually application hang or crash.

Resolution
To detect the components responsible for memory leaks, the user should enable an additional runtime diagnostic called user mode stack trace database. If this diagnostic is enabled, an application dump should be generated manually when the IMA service process has an unusual size.

Read on in CTX106970 here.