High memory usage in Windows 8.1

[korgtronix]

Hi
I have spent the weekend battling an issue on my desktop where my computer gets to 98% memory usage but there isn't anything open or running using that level of RAM.

It had seemed to happen when downloading a large number of games from Steam but other than that the computer is idle and I can't see steam needing 16gb.

Does anyone have any idea on some steps I could take to locate what is causing the memory usage to be so high?

 

[korgtronix]

Its a fresh install that has had all the updates its meant to have and I already have an SSD. It basically becomes unusable when it occurs.

I will give Malware Bytes a go

 

[korgtronix]

Ah ok.



Do that and get back to us.

Gave it a go but it didn't find anything.

When it next occurs, in Task Manager click the Performance tab and then Memory. At the bottom see how much the Non-paged pool is taking up. If all your missing RAM is in there then there's probably a memory leak caused by one of your device drivers.

BF4 + AMD drivers are common culprits so if you have either I would start by updating the AMD graphics drivers.

Don't play BF4 however I did take a look at this. It was a memory leak connected to the network traffic. Essentially what was happening was when I started any downloads the non-page pool will grow by about 1mb/s so eventually kills it.
First thought it was to do with the drivers for my killer but updating them didn't stop it and eventually I found something on another forum that led me to the solution.
Apparently the leak is linked to a Windows service called "Windows Network Data Usage Monitor" disabling this in the Registry key located here "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu" and changing the start value to 4.

Thanks for the help guys.

Link to the post I found is here http://www.eightforums.com/performa...s-8-memory-management-leaks-5.html#post310078