Diagnosing a potential memory leak?

[Cptn.Canuck]

Hey friends,

 

Been dealing with this for a few days now and it's driving me absolutely insane. As I've used it through the day for various tasks, my PC has slowly been using more and more resources, until the task manager claims I'm using nearly all of my ram, and everything grinds to a halt and becomes a laggy mess. Every time it does this though, I've checked the task manager and it's looked like the screenshots below. Nearly 100% usage, but when I add up all of the actual values of what each program uses, it's not even close to enough to cap out my 16gb of ram. I know Windows uses some that doesn't show up here, but the entirety of my task manager is typically 2-3gb, so it's obviously not just the load I'm organically putting on my machine.

 

Some other notes:

- I only recently upgraded to windows 10 from 7 after hearing that they were ceasing to provide security support. The issue seems to have arisen along with, or shortly after that update as I never experienced this once when it was a Win 7 machine.

- Seems like when I took the above screenshots, the disk usage on my K drive was extraordinarily high as well. I'm not entirely sure why that may have been the case, maybe relevant? K drive is a 4TB HDD that I use for storing games, movies and files. C drive is an SSD that contains windows and every day programs.

- This resource climb tends to happen slowly and take 3-4 hours of usage between browsing and gaming before it completely tanks my performance.

Things I've tried:

- Ran full malwarebytes scan thinking this might have been malware, quarantined a few minor things, but didn't change this issue.

- Ran full windows defender scan, same results as above.

- Updating drivers on all major hardware components of my PC in case the leak was in an outdated driver.

- Generally ending process on certain apps to see if any one in particular caused my ram usage to go back down. None did. Only way I've been able to return to normal system usage is by restarting my PC entirely.

 

System Specs:

- Intel i7 4790k

- GTX 970

- 16gb DDR3 Gskill Ripjaws 1333

Thanks in advance for anyone that tries to help!

[kelvinhall05]

Reinstall Windows. I'm not sure exactly what's causing it, but I feel like it would be easier to reinstall than to fix it.

 

 

You can try a startup repair USB, but idk.

[KarathKasun]

Get process monitor to get detailed memory breakdowns for each program.

 

100% its Firefox.

[Cptn.Canuck]

27 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Get process monitor to get detailed memory breakdowns for each program.

 

100% its Firefox.

Hmm, Firefox is showing a slow ramp up of resources, but still not to the full extent of taking my entire PC's resources. Is the current release of firefox known to have issues like this? Or maybe popular addons? I don't have too much customization on my firefox. Just ublock origin, a color-swapping addon for google docs, and tampermonkey running no active scripts.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Your non-paged pool is through the roof. You most likely have a leaky driver. And most times I've seen people have this, it's their network driver. Updating the driver should fix this.

 

EDIT: I noticed you also have a VMWare thing going on, judging by the network device you have. I've seen it before where VMs also take space in the Non-Paged pool

[Cptn.Canuck]

18 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Your non-paged pool is through the roof. You most likely have a leaky driver. And most times I've seen people have this, it's their network driver. Updating the driver should fix this.

 

EDIT: I noticed you also have a VMWare thing going on, judging by the network device you have. I've seen it before where VMs also take space in the Non-Paged pool

That's good information. Thanks a lot. I've updated my network drivers, so we'll give it some time and see if my ram usage continues rising.

Any way that you know of to "secure" VMWare to be entirely idle when I'm not running it aside from just straight up uninstalling? Are there certain settings I can tweak or set to keep it contained?

[colonel_mortis]

19 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

EDIT: I noticed you also have a VMWare thing going on, judging by the network device you have. I've seen it before where VMs also take space in the Non-Paged pool

Second this - VMs can be very memory-hungry, and their usage doesn't get tracked by task manager properly. If you have a VM open at the moment, try closing it and see if that fixes it.

[Cptn.Canuck]

Yeah, VMWare is entirely inactive as far as I'm aware. I don't use it regularly, and haven't used it since I started seeing this issue. I mostly pop it up every couple months to try learning to use linux.

[FUIT1985]

42 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Your non-paged pool is through the roof. You most likely have a leaky driver. And most times I've seen people have this, it's their network driver. Updating the driver should fix this.

 

EDIT: I noticed you also have a VMWare thing going on, judging by the network device you have. I've seen it before where VMs also take space in the Non-Paged pool

 

19 minutes ago, Cptn.Canuck said:

Yeah, VMWare is entirely inactive as far as I'm aware. I don't use it regularly, and haven't used it since I started seeing this issue. I mostly pop it up every couple months to try learning to use linux.

The driver fix is a good solution.
You also try to check which programs are automatically started when the computer is turned on.
To learn how to use linux you install the distro on an external pen drive with refind. VMWare is useless.
Good luck

[Cptn.Canuck]

So far since updating my drivers 3-ish hours ago, ram usage has been low and stable. Doesn't seem to be climbing. Thanks to everyone for your input and @Mira Yurizaki especially for pointing me to the network drivers.

For anyone finding this thread in the future, make sure you're updating your drivers by manually identifying your components and going to the manufacturer's site for drivers. I had tried updating my network drivers before in this process, but just went to the device manager and used the windows automated "search online for drivers." That shit don't work, and when it says you have the latest drivers, you probably don't.