We’ve just moved to running DSC for the developer environment, everything is working correctly now however we have one very strange problem with ReSharper! The installer itself OOM’s when installed through DSC. When executed through a startup script or manually it works first time. We’ve raised this issue with JetBrains (who make it) and they’ve added it onto their backlog to fix.
This poses the question why?! The installer does use up ~1.1GB of RAM when it’s executed, however I don’t understand what about DSC would cause this to be a problem!
It depends a lot on what the installer is trying to do. For example, if it assumes the presence of a user profile, that’ll contribute to a failure, because one doesn’t exist when run under the LCM. Or if it is trying to instantiate some GUI elements - that’ll explode, and depending on how it handles the failure, that could lead to excess memory consumption.
Hmm, we did think about similar things, however when the installer is run from a GP startup script it works; this too is executed in essentially an identical environment (without a user profile & the ability to create windows) as I understand it.
“Essentially” but not “exactly.” There’s a partial environment, for starters, as well as a fully authenticated set of tokens (the computer’s). The LCM only runs with a local token, and has effectively zero environment beyond the base system. But in the end, it’s very unlikely to be something you can do anything about - it’s definitely something the installer is doing.
Ah! Useful to know; I was thinking that there might be some sort of sub-process maximum memory limit or similar for some reason. I’ll continue to hassle JetBrains
No maximum that I know of, although keep in mind that the LCM is also pinning up PowerShell, the DLR, a bunch of .NET, and so on - so there’s definitely more RAM involved than in a startup script.