High memory usage in Windows 8.1

korgtronix

korgtronix

korgtronix

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Joined
23 Jan 2013
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228
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?
 
Is Windows running updates at the time? That can use a fair bit of CPU and memory on occasion. Is it a new install? Sometimes SuperFetch can take a while learning what applications you use most.

Is it taking a performance hit at all? Not that it'll actually help memory usage in this case, but maybe getting an SSD (if you don't already have one) would help in this regard?

Finally download Malware bytes and see if it finds anything. Just running it will help rule malware out.
 
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
 
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.
 
linktoinsanity said:
Ah ok.



Do that and get back to us. :)
Click to expand...

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.
Click to expand...

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
 
^Had to do the same thing on my set up too running with Windows 8.1 and all available Windows updates applied.

Did the registry fix "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu" 'start value to 4' as suggested on the internet forums.

Next and as I did want to keep all extra stuff that comes in the Killer software suite I grabbed my installed network drivers from here C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\e22w8x64.inf_amd64_7b93533b1a84b94b before uninstalling the Killer software suite and rebooted.

Then I just pointed Windows Device Manager to the folder I had the 4 driver files saved in to reinstall the network adaptor.

So far no more memory leaks.

I wonder if there are any others on here with same motherboard experiencing the same problem we have both encountered?
 
I think it's the way the Killer network drivers communicate with Windows that causes the memory leak. Had a friend with the network card and in the end he got an Intel PCI network card and disabled the Killer. No problems after that.
 
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