Windows – How much swap is being used on windows

I've had success with Sysinternals Process Explorer. With this, you can search to find what process(es) have a file open, and you can use it to close the handle(s) if you want. Of course, it is safer to close the whole process. Exercise caution and judgement.

To find a specific file, use the menu option Find->Find Handle or DLL... Type in part of the path to the file. The list of processes will appear below.

If you prefer command line, Sysinternals suite includes command line tool Handle, that lists open handles.

Examples

• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "e:\" (finds all files opened from drive e:\"
• c:\Program Files\SysinternalsSuite>handle.exe |findstr /i "file-or-path-in-question"

JP, I believe your comment that this is an automated build / unit test server that is running less than stable code says it all. My guess is that this server needs to be rebooted frequently because of the unstable code running on it probably has memory leaks that are giving you the symptoms you are seeing. Memory leaks are not going to get listed on any of the process trees of running processes as they are memory that is grabbed by processes that no longer exist, and are still allocated, even though the process associated with them are long gone.

Get a frequent maintenance window to allow you to automagically reboot this machine, perhaps nightly, a couple times a week, or weekly depending upon the speed at which this behavior starts to exhibit performance issues.

We have Oracle Application Servers servers on Windoze a while back that needed to be rebooted twice daily. We kicked out the users at lunch time, and in the middle of the night every day. That was a few years back, with supposedly stable productions code from Oracle.