Search the Community

Hello everyone, As of writing this post, some users (like me) may experience high RAM usage after running the system for a while with many windows opens. When said windows are closed, RAM usage doesn't decrease accordingly. The problem lies in the "Desktop Window Manager". It's a known Windows 10 memory leak that Microsoft hasn't fixed yet. In my case, it results to over 8 additional GB of RAM usage. There is a way to help it. You can terminate the process while the system is running with no windows opened (might cause program crashes otherwise) and it will restart in a couple of seconds. How to do it: Open: Task Manager > Performance Tab > Open Resource Monitor (bottom) > Memory Tab > find process "dwm.exe" > right click on process > End Process Screen will go black for a few seconds, after which the process will restart without using more than 200mb of RAM and you can go back to work. P.S: Restarting the system does the same thing, but for those who don't want to - this is the only way for now. I hope Microsoft fixes it soon. Cheers

Over the past months, I've had issues with my computer running low on available RAM and slowly becoming more sluggish as time passes (a period of days to weeks). A temporary fix is to restart my computer, which lowers the used RAM to a level that I think is more normal. I replaced an old set of RAM a while ago because of issues with an entire stick being reserved for hardware (not sure what the issue was, but using a new set seemed to fix that issue). Additionally I updated my drivers about a month ago because of audio driver failures, but some of the front USB ports aren't recognized (has been known a problem ever since I got the computer, wasn't able to fix it then). I'm not sure what is causing high RAM usage, but I poked around online today and from what I can see I probably have a memory leak. Using a program that finds zombie processes revealed that a Razer driver was holding ~4000 handles, but ending that process did not fix the problem; however it did release all the zombie handles. The last time I did Windows Memory Diagnostic (few months back, high RAM issue had already been occurring) it revealed nothing of note. I saw somewhere that handle count should be 10-20 thousand, so this looks off to me. Any insight on how to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated. Edit: I originally made this post under the assumption that I had a handle leak, but it sounds like that is not an issue in this case Memory after leaving computer on for a week CPU after leaving computer on for a week User memory usage after leaving computer on for a week Process explorer after leaving computer on for a week Memory after restart CPU after restart (User memory is roughly equal) Process explorer after restart It's difficult to look at all the parts since I use a remote desktop (won't be able to access physically for another few days), but here are the parts I have written down : System: HP ENVY 700-406 Motherboard: MS-7906 (stock, Orchid-S) OS: 64 bit Windows 10 (Updated 30 mins before post, did a clean install half a year ago) Bios: Not sure, last time I tried to update bios I could not for the life of me find a new one since the manufacturer no longer has this MoBo listed Processor: AMD Athlon X4 880K Graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 560-B Boot drive: 112 GB SSD (Not sure of brand) Hard drive: 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 Memory: 2x8 GB 1600MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR3 This obviously isn't a top of the line computer, but it works for what I need it to do (light gaming, medium gaming on low settings, single threaded programming, light multithreaded programming).

So the basic premise is that this has been happening for awhile, and although I am more tech savvy, I have not been able to find a way to figure out what is causing the leak so I can fix it. Does anyone know if there is someone I can go to to get help on this or if anyone has any ideas of how to troubleshoot or go about solving this problem? Its getting a little old having to keep restarting my computer because 6-9GB of my memory are useless...

Hello new member here asking for help ! I have a 16gb Memory setup. currently my ram, with only 1 chrome tab open is sitting at 14gb. Processes show chrome being the top memory eating sitting at 500MB and next to it is the Anti Malware Executable sitting at 20MB. There is no way that all my processes total to 14GB of memory. Actually i have been observing this lately, when ever i dont restart/turn off my computer for weeks the ram usage would slowly creep up. I know for sure that this is some program/drivers leaking memory. A;though a restart solves this problem. But i think its time that i address this problem. How do i find this program? also if you recommend a software it must be usable without restarting the computer because this would cause everything to reset and my ram would go back to its normal 4 or 5 GB of usage. It would take weeks again for this to go up again. I am using Windows 10, and Task Manager. No specials programs. Thank you for your help

So one day, the Intel Driver Assistant downloaded an "out of date" driver - the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers and installed it. It sat in my laptop for weeks, and nothing bad happened. But then, I noticed my computer would get very slow after I leave it on for more than 2 days. After looking into task manager, my non-paged pool is at 3.6GB. Using PoolMon, the thing that was causing it was iaStorA.sys (Intel Rapid Storage Technology). I then uninstalled it using Programs and Features menu, thinking that the problem was fixed. Turns out, iaStorA.sys was still there, and it was still causing memory leaks. i tried out the methods below, didn't work either. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/uninstalling-the-intelr-rapid-storage-technology/e3c4b6d6-56ba-4ac5-be50-89843c9d9b22 How do I get rid of it? It's mildly annoying to reboot my laptop every day.

Ok so my computer recently just started getting slower so I thought that I would open up task manager and see if it was a RAM issue. and when I opened it up it said that I was using 8gb out of my total 16 on idle! I have nothing running in the background and the computer has never done this before so i'm thinking that it's a memory leak or something but I have no idea what is causing it to leak memory?! I've been trying to fix this problem for a couple of days now and even though it's not affecting my usage of this computer that much it is very worrisome to me that there is some program thats hogging 6+ gb of my ram which is not normal I don't think. If anyone could help me figure out what the hay is going on and how to fix this issue it would be much appreciated thank you

Hi. I've been having a lot of memory leak issues with the current Windows edition on my PC. It's Creators' Update v1703 build 15063.138. Idle memory usage is about 14% (1146 MB of 8GB). But when I'm playing games that use up to 3GB of system RAM (GTA V, Dying Light), the system memory consumption jumps up to about 80% (6553 MB) instead of being 3GB + ~1500 MB and finally the game crashes and a low memory warning appears. RAM usage is always more than actual + game usage. I had a laptop with 8GB of RAM shared between the system and the iGPU with Windows 10 10240 which never had any memory leak issues. PC Specs: R5 1600 stock, 2x4 GB 2133MHz OCed to 2666MHz, MSI GTX 1070 Gaming X stock, Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3. Could this also be because of the memory OC? I've never played without it. I'm installing another version/build of Win10 because Creators' Update has issues for me. I really loved build 10240. Are there updates for it and support for latest NVIDIA, AMD Ryzen drivers?

I've noticed a few times that my older laptop gets extremely slow after being on overnight, checking taskmanager shows explorer.exe using over 5gb's of RAM. It's probably something i did but since this laptop is very old (bought in 2012 i think), but how should i approach this issue? how can i find out what is eating away at explorer.exe? it's something that has started recently (think about 2 weeks ago tops). simply ending the explorer.exe process and then starting it again via task manager fixes it but its not really a solution, more symptom control. PS: windows 7 64 bit home edition with 8gb working memory.

Here's my situation. As of a few days ago, my computer was working perfectly normally and was completely fine. For the past few weeks, I have been running this Minecraft server for my friends and I to play on. A few days ago, all of a sudden, my chrome browser begins to have issues while my server is running. It gives me the "aw snap" message and crashes. I thought that this might have been a temporary issue, and decided to shut down the server for the day and restart my computer. Upon restarting, everything seemed to work fine when I was running chrome with a few tabs between my monitors. I decided to play a game and watch a video at the same time and discovered more problems. The game would either crash after a while or chrome would give the error message again and crash itself. Fast forward to today, and the problem has just amplified. Games won't load up on their own without crashing or bugging out, and I can barely even keep one tab of chrome up without it crashing. I am making sure to copy this post every few seconds just in case chrome crashes while I am writing it. I tested to see what would happen if I booted up my server again, and was prompted with the message "Error occurred during initialization of VM, Could not reserve enough space for object heap". Also, sometimes chrome said it could not reserve enough memory for the page. Yet despite all of this, my memory usage was still only around 35%. I can hardly launch anything now and it's really frustrating because I build it a month ago. A quick note is that I had this same problem on my old pc when I ran a server, but only figured that it was just my computer finally biting the dust after 5 years. Now I think it's a problem with the server but have found no reports on a similar issue anywhere else. I am posting this here to ask if anyone has had a similar problem with their memory or computer. Thanks for the help in advance, Earn

Hello, I'm working with a system that is showing signs of a memory leak. - Intel Core i5 8600k (stock) - Corsair 2x8gb kit of 3000mhz - MSI Z370 SLI PLUS motherboard - MSI GTX 1070ti GAMING X - 970 Samsung 250gb NVMe ssd - 1TB WD Blue hdd - Windows 10 Pro x64 with latest updates - The system has a fixed pagefile of 2gb. In safe-mode, both In-Use and Committed memory usages in Task Manager report a low 1gb and what ever is done, it is behaving normally, filling up and emptying. However when the pc boots without safe mode, it is higher as expected since most things load up. After a few minutes the system has 4gb In-Use and 6gb Committed Ram (idle, which is already a little higher considering there aren't many things running on the pc besides usual, Razer synapse, Discord, and normal services). If a game is started such as Grand Theft Auto V or Far Cry 5, the In-Use behaves normal, floating around 4-9gb of Ram. BUT the Committed usage starts raising rapidly and doesn't go down, as shown on the pictures is closing in to it's limit while it shouldn't be. I included some pictures of RAMMap and Resource monitor to help identify the problem (The leak is not visible, at least to me, indicating a driver leak?). - Once it reaches 18gb Committed (even with active Ram still having space), the system will attempt to crash an app. Things already tried: - Updated drivers - Rolled back drivers - Uninstalled GPU drivers (which cut both memory usages in half) - Re-installed Windows 10 with the latest updates - Tried to recreate the same issue on another system (i7-3770k, 16gb, old HD7770 1GB gpu) with same windows settings and all, failed. Ram usage behavior on the 3770k system behaves normal as it should be, In-Use 8gb, Committed 9gb while in-game, Idle scenario follows symmetrically and is normal again. - About the test on the older system, it did cross my mind because it has a weaker gpu and used different graphics settings that it might use less memory as well, but after setting the 8600k system up to match the game settings, the memory problem remained. Is this a known issue, perhaps with NVIDIAs recent driver versions or another driver etc? Thanks in advance, every reply is appreciated!

TL;DR: physical DIMM is causing 'hardware reserved' issues, with the DIMM itself being 4GB and causing a 6GB reservation (50%) when slotted combined with 3 other DIMMs. Booting with that particular DIMM (solo) is unsuccessfull, but it is detected when slotted combined with the other 3 DIMMs. Windows Memory Diagnostic tool does not report any issues on any of the DIMMs. Futhermore, a re-occurring (related?) issue with non-paged pool ammount can take up to 75% of the available RAM, but does not always occur. Advice requested on next diagnostic steps. Dear reader, I have had the following problems for quite some time now, yet never had the time and energy to really solve it. One of the DIMMs is causing a 50% hardware reserved RAM problem, when taken out it is solved. However, a second problem of large non-paged pool memory can take up to 75% of the available RAM sometimes. They are probably related, yet the second issue still occurs without 'faulty' DIMM from the first issue. I would like understand the cause behind the first issue, and advice on how to solve the second issue. System and Background This is my old system, has run with W10 before. Is has been through many hardware changes, but always stable in its current configuration (excluding videocard, but I'm not supsecting that aspect to be the cause). Phenom II X4 965 BE (stock) MSI 970 gaming 2x2GB GEIL DDR3-1300 2x4GB Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600 The memory kits have been matched on voltages and timings, and I have never had any issues using these two kits together before (has been used for ±20 months with aforementioned configuration). It is a clean install of W10 Pro (1803) on a brand new HDD (previous one failed), and is primarely used as a multimedia machine and webbrowsing. Issue #1: DIMM causing 50% hardware reserved RAM For quite a while this system is/was having a large RAM hardware reserved buffer, a total of 6GB reserved (50% of total). Initial moment of this problem starting is unknown. After some basic research and tests (Memory Diagnostic tool, checking processes etc.) I started playing around with the physical DIMMs themselves. With all 4 DIMMs in use, 6 out of 12GB is reserved. After testing all possible configurations of DIMMs (single, dual, triple, quad) in different DIMM slots (1-4), I found that one of the Ballistic DIMMs appeared to not work solo (no windows boot). Using it together with any of the other DIMMs, it caused a 50% RAM reservation (no matter the total slotted capacity). But when excluded from any other configuration possbile (2;2x2;4;4x2;2x4;2x4x2 etc.) only ±40MB is reserved. BOOT Advanced options > Maximum memory is (and was) off. Meaning that I am currently using a DIMM configuration of 2x4x2, in DIMM 1-3, for a total of 8GB. In this case, removing a DIMM actually gives me more usable RAM.... > This issue has been 'solved', but not quite understood how a 4GB stick can cause up to 6GB of hardware reserved RAM. I would like to know if I can somehow test if the particular DIMM is actually faulty/broken, even though it is detected (and accepted?) by Windows. Issue #2: non-paged pool memory leak (?) After taking out the 'faulty' DIMM from issue #1, I still noticed a suspected memory leak. RAM usage of processes in Task Manager and Resource Monitor did not add up to the reported total usage in both the Performance tab of Task Manager and CoreTemp RAM usage. I ran RAMMap, which drew my attention to a massive 4GB+ in non-paged pool memory (something I didn't pay attention to in Task Manager). It has even reached 6GB (75% of total RAM). I can literally see it accumulate from after the first seconds after booting to desktop. For example, last time it started at ±100MB and stopped at ±440MB. I don't know if this number is normal though. It appears that it does not always occur and/or continue accumulating linearly plotted against time passed, sometimes the non-paged pool memory stays at ±440MB. This issue also occurred during the initial 4-DIMM configuration from issue #1, but I thought it was related to the reserved RAM and therefore did not look at it more deeply. > My next step is to try and identify the leak with Poolmon, followed up with Kernal Debugger. I have, however, no experience using these tools, and it seems these are mostly used in server scenarios. I was wondering if someone with more Memory-related experiences has some input on my observations and the next steps I'll be undertaking. I have read through some articles, one of which is http://woshub.com/huge-memory-usage-non-paged-pool-windows/. I will also try the network adapter driver tips, but again, these tips seem most applicable for server scenarios. Thanks in advance. Cheers, JB

Hello all! I'm relatively new to LTT website and actually signed up for this reason.... I'm having a problem with my windows 10 pc. Even when my pc is on idle, my RAM usage seems to be gradually increasing over time. I found it out after I was playing League of Legends only to find the game constantly crashing after 1 game. I rebooted my pc to alleviate it and it worked, I assumed I just needed more RAM and hopped on roblox, which I assumed doesn't use much RAM, only to find the same problem. After trying overwatch, an error finally came up saying the RAM was full. I couldn't find any real answers online and after investigating myself, I found that the increased usage was gradual and mainly on svc host.exe processes. I don't want to reboot my pc every hour and constantly be at risk of my pc crashing. Please help... I've attached 6 photos documenting the increase of my pc's memory usage over time. The second sc (middle memory usage) was taken within 23 minutes of the 1st screenshot (lowest, around 4 gb). With the highest taken 10 minutes after the second. I humbly await any response ? My pc specs are: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X@3.6GHz Viper Blackout series DDR4 RAM@3000 MHz nvidia GTX 660 500GB HDD, 1TB HDD and 240GB ssd Microsoft windows 10

My games keep crashing and sometimes fortnite keeps using 9-10 GB of my ram which causes the game to crash or even run at 10 fps. at first I thought fortnite was the only game that was crashing but CSGO, GTA online all of them started crashing. I emailed epic games (I didn't know it happened on other games at that point) and they sent me this" However in case you have proceeded with all of our troubleshooting steps and you are still encountering FPS drops you are possibly experiencing hardware issues.As I am certain you understand Epic Player Support is unable to further assist you with changes regarding your PC."Is there a way to fix this? this usually happens after playing the game for 30,40 minutes and for some reason happens the most on creative, Except it doesn't happen at all on my islands.Most of the times it says fortnite is using "10GB" in task manager but a few times I saw "unrealcefsubprocess" use it instead and it fixes when I ends that task but it comes back after 10-15 minutes but fortnite starts using more ram instead.(fortnite) On GTA and other games it just crashes without any error other than the launcher telling me it crashed. Is this something to do with my GPU? or my CPU? (Fps drops down to 1-10)Specs:Cpu: i7-8700kRam: Corsair VENGEANCE PRO RGB 16GB (2x8GB)Gpu: MSI RTX 2070 Gaming 8GMB: MSI MPG Z390 GAMING EDGE ACMy OS is on: Samsung 970 EVO PLUS M.2 250GBMy game is on: Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD

The problem well as you can see in the pictures my computer uses 90% of its ram when I'm in idle. And in the other picture you can see that I have 16 gigs of ram on my computer. and in the taskmanager, there is nothing that uses 15 gigs of ram.so this sounds kinda normal for a memory leak, well here's my problem. for most people, u can fix this by just turning on and turning off your computer. well guess what?! as soon as I start the computer again. the same millisecond it starts it's up to 90%. LIKE WTF? would be glad for some help. And no, according to my anti-virus there are no viruses. System specs: Motherboard: MSI 970 gaming. Cpu: AMD fx-8350 ram: Kingstone 16gb ddr3 Graphics card: Nvidia MSI Gtx 1060 6b. PSU: 500w. don't remember the brand. 500 GB SSD 1 TB HardDrive 2 TB Harddrive

Take a look at the attached screenshots... As you can see, I am nearing 100% memory utilization, which is just absurd! What I have noticed is that day after day, this constant memory usage will increase by 1 to 2 GB, and as you can see from the screenshots, my PC has only been on for 7 days and has increased to a consistent 14 GB of memory utilization. After a fresh reboot this does go down, but it start off at about 6 to 8 GB of utilization. In the processes tab, I see nothing that's hogging up all this memory. The highest one is Chrome, as expected, but not 14 GB worth. So somehow, somewhere, I have a program installed that has a memory leak or just bad memory management system. How can I go about investigating this further? Any particular software capable of diagnosing this? I am not exactly sure when it started, I just remember one time coming home a couple weeks ago to my computer totally locked up, indicating a high usage of memory. A reboot helped, but again the memory utilization started off at like 8 GB. Ever since then, I've been keeping Task Manager open so that I can actively monitor it. The issues is not going away and starting to become a nuisance. Now, I just so happened to have upgraded to Ryzen about 2 to three weeks ago, entailing a new mobo, CPU, and RAM, which falls closely inline with this ordeal. I'm not sure if this was an issue previously as I did not monitor my memory usage that closely and probably restarted my rig at least once every week or so. Could this be an issue with the DDR4 RAM I have installed? The only thing I have tried thus far is turn off paging, but as you can see the issue persisted since I am now here. Any suggestions?? Gerneio

As of recent, my RAM will just get eaten up by no process in particular. It's a memory leak for sure, I'm just having trouble rooting out the problem since I've checked most, if not all the big problems they might be I'll list my computer's builds and things I've done recently. Processor: Intel i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz Motherboard: Asus Z170 AR RAM: 16 GBs in total, 2 sticks of 8 GB Patriot Viper DDR4 RAM Graphics Card: Geforce GTX 970 HD: An old-ish Seagate 1tb HDD, from 2012? it's the one thing I'm not too sure on. I'll leave my computer alone and all the RAM will be in use by seemingly no particular process. Right now it's running smooth, but I can see it coming back (I'm currently at 6 GBs of 16 just running Chrome and Steam, no active downloads.) This has been happening since about Thursday when I got home from classes; I just came back to a PC that had all of its RAM in use, it'll usually start low before ramping up in no time flat, or over the course of a few hours. So far to try and remedy the problem is scan for malware with malwarebytes, run the memory diagnostic test which cropped up with nothing, removed all startup processes (I don't run any anyways, but I doublechecked to make sure), updated all the drivers for my motherboard that I could possibly think of. The only thing I haven't done is mess with the registry like some have said.

As i said in the title, my rig is using 7.7 gb of my 8gb ram while streaming 360p videos and browsing ltt (3 tabs in total).I´ve ran windows defender and i have 0 viruses (definitions where updated about 2 day ago).Does anyone know why it is behaving so wired? It does that pretty often ... about 2 hours afer reboot it hits the ram cap.

Hi everyone. So when I boot my computer sometimes my memory starts with 6Gb used. This may not be normal because if I reboot it sometimes it starts with only 2Gb. The thing is that my task manager doesn't have any process using that much RAM. And all the processes together don't add up to that number. I'll post an image bellow. Please help me solve this. Thanks in advance.

Every week or so, one day i will I notice my RAM usage slowly climb until it reaches max and then i experience big slow downs. It uses about 100MB of RAM every 3-5 seconds until it uses all 16GBs.I have 16GB of DDR2400, Team Group RAM. Only about 1GB of this RAM gets reported as used in task manager but "System and compressed memory" appears and uses the most when this happens (and reports 700MB of used RAM). Any ideas on what is happening here? A system restart solves this problem until it happens again.

What the hell is happening to my memory? Help, anyone? Did run a quick scan on windows defender. Ty for answers.

This guide helps you find "invisible" memory leaks in driver space. It'll help you understand what, why, and how. Memory leaks? Start by watching this video if you haven't. Linus does a pretty good job of explaining it all! Driver memory leaks? What Linus explains well is that programs can claim up space and not give it back. Or they can be closed yet not actually exit its process. These are fairly easy to find and fix through Sysinternals' Process Explorer or even Windows' Task Manager. Driver leaks, however, don't show up in process lists! They can cause gigs of your RAM to just vanish into thin air, and are harder to diagnose. Luckily, I've got your back. Getting PoolMon Poolmon is a tool that you can use in windows to find out various details about (kernel-space) driver memory usage. To get poolmon, install http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=526733 The Windows Driver Kit. Beware though that this is a pretty big installation! Using Poolmon Open a CMD and punch in these commands - you may need admin rights: 64-Bit WIndows cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64" poolmon /p 32-Bit windows cd "C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x86" poolmon /p Note that the directory where poolmon resides may be slightly different depending on the version that you have. Just look in the near vicinity of "C:\Program Files\Windows Kits" for Poolmon Finding the culprit In Poolmon, press B. It then sorts from high to low, counting the size in bytes of the memory usage in the pool. For the top entry (there might be multiple big entries), get the tag (For example, my highest entry is NDbf) and write it down. Now locate the actual driver name. Punch these two in another CMD prompt(Replacing NDbf with your tag): cd "C:\windows\system32\drivers" findstr /m /l NDbf *.sys results in "SamsungRapidDiskFltr.sys" for me. This makes sense since Samsung's RAPID mode is enabled and caches stuff into my RAM. Now what You should now know which driver is eating your RAM. Update it, find an alternative or remove it. Maybe lodge a support ticket with the responsible company.

So i am using a lot of ram. 75% of 16Gb is being used and it keep climbing untill my pc will lock up and restart. I have had a cursory look around and updated my killer network drivers and such but with no success. Anybody have an idea of what is using so much of my ram??

I gave MC 10gb but on my mood ed game and it uses 7% then continues to go up until it hits 100% then it freezes for 5 seconds and goes back down to 7%

Hi all, I recently got my 2nd 970 installed for SLI and on the whole its been great. I have had a couple of occasions (seems to be isolated to GTA 5) where the game crashes due to low system memory. Ive read this could be due to the way the game is handling the extra texture information at 4k. Now the fact it says "low system memory" made me think about adding another 2x8gb ram to my system to try and alleviate this issue, would it have any effect?

Hi, I've already posted about the issue and landed on the idea that it was due to a memory leak, a restart fixed it. However, I notice that everytime I leave my computer idle for a little while come back, notice a scan has been done, I can't move my mouse normally and the computer is literally running at 0.0001 FPS (mouse movement wise) Here are some screenshots: http://imgur.com/a/7bcwf this happens all of the time for some reason, and I wonder if its due to my Anti-Virus (Norton). Note that my computer has never done this until recently (a week ago) and its really starting to piss me off... Note also: I've ran a scan with MBAM and it found nothing, I also have had this computer for a while and the HDD is starting to die (read/write speeds are slow as shit) anyways, any comments are appreciated, thanks. -Elliott