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Here's the issue, a lot of the support staff at the software company where I work have thin client machines, they like to listen to Pandora and that's ok, it's not a bandwidth issue. I've noticed that the amount of RAM Pandora takes up on each user's session seems to increase with the amount of time they've got their browser open.

I'm not totally sure why it happens, I've postulated that it's becasue the DOM on their page just grows and grows with each new bit of advertising.

What is the best way to confront this particular inconvenience?

Peter Turner
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  • What browsers are they using? – Josh Brower Jun 22 '09 at 13:15
  • I've noticed Pandora eating up a ton of RAM on my system as I leave it open all day - I would say a bug within the Pandora flash applet; not anything you could 'fix' except for having them close/restart the applet occasionally. – Dave Drager Jun 22 '09 at 13:21
  • @Josh some use Firefox and some use IE. I've been experimenting and Opera has a lower memory pull (I only need to restart it twice in a 9 hr day) on my own machine. – Peter Turner Jun 22 '09 at 13:26
  • @Dave, it might be Flash, but it might be their advertising. But that was a good idea, I just set my Opera browser to refresh the page every 90 minutes. I'd need a pretty fancy script to force TS's to do that though. – Peter Turner Jun 22 '09 at 13:35

4 Answers4

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If you think it's the ads you can put flashblock and adblock plugins for firefox and only allow the pandora app.

Personally I think it's pandora. If I leave it open too long on whatever system it seems to slow things down.

MathewC
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If you are running Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition there is a handy tool called WSRM (Windows System Resource Manager). I believe in 2008 they moved the feature to all versions of server (someone please comment and I will adjust if this assertion is wrong).

In any case, WSRM can kill any process that goes above a certain amount of memory and/or processor usage. This can be pointed at particular processes (in your case probably iexplore.exe), or at users as well, or at certain users running certain processes. It will be a sudden shut down of the process, which you may not want to do because it is abrupt, but it would solve your problem.

Matt
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  • Yeah, that's how we ID'd the problem. They're just hurting themselves though since our TS can accomodate them, assuming they stay < 256MGs. – Peter Turner Jun 23 '09 at 20:07
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Have you looked at installing one of the Pandora desktop clients like OpenPandora? Perhaps they do not suffer from the memory leak that the Internet Explorer version does.

Kevin Kuphal
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    I like this idea, then from there you can implement the WSRM on the OpenPandora process, instead of the browser, which may have other things open as well. – Matt Jun 22 '09 at 17:24
  • Glancing at the source code, the OpenPandora project simply frames in the browser component from IE, so this will not give you any benefit. That is of course if the Pandora application itself is where the leak is. If it is related to other parts of their page, this will probably help. – Brad Jul 27 '11 at 14:21
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I experienced the same problem, then I started using Open Pandora and I haven't experienced the same memory depletion.