Adobe Reader - large process handle count/memory leak

[bm10]

We're running Adobe Reader 19.012.20040 in a Citrix environment and experiencing issues with the servers running out of physical memory, bringing the server to a crawl. These servers have 96GB of RAM each and normal usage is around 20GB. Hoping that someone has experienced this something similar. When people start reporting getting out of memory errors and slowness, we open Task Manager and review the process with highest handle count.

Everytime this occurs, it's a single AcroRd32.exe process with over 45,0000 handles open. Task manager also shows over 90GB of RAM in use, but none of the processess show high memory usage, only the high handle count of AcroRd32.exe. As soon as that Adobe Reader process is killed, memory usage drops from >90GB  to <20GB within several seconds.

We checked the PDF the user was working on and made sure protected mode is disabled in preferences. It's happening with different users, PDF files, and different Citrix servers. Anyone have reccomendations?

[Test Screen Name]

Reader is a 32-bit app, so no Acrord32.exe process can use more than 2 GB of RAM. Since this isn't usual, it may be worth examining which handles it is using to see what most of them are.

[bm10]

Right, and task manager never shows it using high memory. The only thing that shows abnormal is the handle count on the process (usually >40 times higher than any other process). Is there a particular method to determine what handles Adobe Reader has? Thank you.

[Bernard91]

I have the same issue with memory leaks. A PDF document of 100 k bytes increases memory usage by about 20 MB per page being read. After 14 pages, the size of my document, memory usage had increased by 310 MB, although the number of handles remained about the same. Closing the document freed about 120 MB. After a certain number of tests, memory usaged soared to 16 GB ! And, indeed, the task managers reports AcroRd32 using 54 MB. Closing Acrord32 solved the problem.

Version used is 2020.006.20042.

Afterwards, I used Foxit to check the origin of this issue: no problem whatever arose while reading the document over and over again.

[komod]

Could you solve the problem? We have the same issue and we can reproduce it with files created in abbyy finereader with watermarks. But neither abbyy oder adobe can help us with this problem.

[bm10]

No, we have never figured out the root cause of this issue and still experiencing this. It's interesting you mention Abby as this program is also in use in the environment. Was there certain steps you go through to re-produce the problem? I can try and replicate in our environment as well.

[komod]

It looks like the problem in our environment is just with these documents, created in abbyy finereader with a watermark.

When one of these documents is open with adobe reader we experiencing the same issues which you mentioned the temrinalservers running out of physical memory. 

[komod]

Did you try to replicate this problem?

[Test Screen Name]

I suggest you share a problem file. To respect company confidentiality, you could scan a neutral public document and see if you still have the problem.

[bm10]

Yes, if you can share a problem file, I can try and open from Adobe Reader in our environment to see if can re-produce.

[bm10]

I tried adding a simple watermark to a single page PDF, but couldn't produce any issue. Does it only happen with larger PDF's?

[Naveen31624551kjrb]

Check this out:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/high-memory-usage/td-p/13937110#:~:text=1%20Corre...