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I just set up 5 Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard servers running Remote Desktop Services in a Session Collection.

The latest server I put on has 96GB of RAM and hosts 80 - 160 users. All users are simply getting web access with Firefox for the most part.

Every day since putting this on, I have had from one to three users' firefox instances balloon up to a maximum of 30GB(!!!!!) of memory consumed each day. On inspecting their traffic, it was usually either:

  • YouTube
  • Music Streaming
  • Any flash content

Most users only had 1 or 2 tabs open. It appears that Flash is the culprit.

I have Flash fully updated to the latest version, and Firefox is running on the latest version. All OS updates have been done as well.

Why is this happening / how can I curb this? I can't have 3 users take up all of the server's resources.

dthree
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  • Not sure if there's a good answer to this really. See http://serverfault.com/questions/571722/is-there-a-replacement-for-the-removed-windows-system-resource-manager-feature. – Ryan Ries Jan 16 '16 at 19:35
  • Yeah - I was looking at that post the other day to my dismay..... – dthree Jan 16 '16 at 19:38

1 Answers1

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I put together a temporary "handling" for the problem that is not a handling at all. I am still absolutely looking for the actual source of the problem.

Temporary Handling

I built a Powershell script that runs on chron, which finds all firefox instances running up excessive amounts of memory, messages the user and then kills the process.

foreach ($comp in $args) {
  $size = 4000000000
  $owners = Get-WmiObject -ComputerName $comp -Query "Select * from Win32_Process where WorkingSetSize > $size and name = 'firefox.exe'" | Select @{Label='Owner';Expression={$_.GetOwner().User}}
  foreach ($i in $owners) {
    $is = $i.Owner
    $msg = 'AUTOMATED MESSAGE: Your web browser was using an excessive amount of memory and has been closed to prevent it from overloading the server. You can open it again right after this.'
    $cmd = "msg.exe $is /SERVER:$comp '$msg' "
    Invoke-Expression $cmd
  }
  Invoke-Command -ComputerName $comp {Get-Process | Where {($_.Name -eq "firefox") -and ($_.WorkingSet64 -gt 4000000000)} | Stop-Process -Force }
}

To invoke:

.\kill.ps1 ts1 ts2 ts3 ts4 ts5
dthree
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