Crazy Memory Leak

[Inkz]

Hi, so my laptop has done this for a while, but recently it has been pretty bad, I have to restart my laptop almost every day because of memory leak. I have 16GB of RAM, yet it said I was using 95% in Task manager with only a few programs plus Windows, the numbers don't add up. But if I do a restart then it's down to where it belongs. 

[Anghammarad]

A quick question... perhaps a Killer Nic / WiFi in that thingie? 

 

There was a time not long ago where killer drivers were nomming up ram.

 

[TheKDub]

19 minutes ago, Inkz said:

Hi, so my laptop has done this for a while, but recently it has been pretty bad, I have to restart my laptop almost every day because of memory leak. I have 16GB of RAM, yet it said I was using 95% in Task manager with only a few programs plus Windows, the numbers don't add up. But if I do a restart then it's down to where it belongs. 

Any change if you go to the Details tab and sort by Memory? 

[Bitter]

Are you showing all processes? I had an issue like this with Windows 10 a while back that also coincided with a lot of disk use all the time, the OS was generating hundreds and thousands of log files into RAM then flushing them to disk, it also took a long time to shut down. They were all very small in size so it would have taken millions of them for me to notice a loss in disk space. I was able to sort all the processes by disk use, then google which one it was, then find some others who had ran into the issue, and the solution was very simple. You just deleted all the the files in a directory after stopping the service. The root cause was some kind of broken update that corrupted a file and caused the process to fail and log the fail in the background endlessly. Crazy stuff!

[Inkz]

[Bitter]

It may have been that same service for me, that sounds familiar. It's obviously not running a scan because there's low CPU use, go to the performance tab and check disk use, is the PC mostly doing writes constantly? If you can end the service then do so, it'll probably restart but check the memory use to see if it dropped when you ended the service running and then over time slowly creeps back up. If both then it sounds like the same issue I had. 

[Inkz]

[Bitter]

And when you ended the process did the memory use drop and slowly creep back up?

[Inkz]

Which service?

[Bitter]

The one doing all the disk writes...

[Inkz]

Hm, I went to check and it was chrome, I kinda need that

[Bitter]

That's not what your screen shot of task manager shows when ordered by disk activity from greatest to least. If you end the process with the greatest disk writes, does the memory use in the performance tab also change? Not all memory consumed is visible to you in task manager by process so plainly as you'd expect. This sounds very similar to the issue I was experiencing, but it was almost a year ago and I've forgotten the specifics, I can only recall my trouble shooting process and the findings that led me to the solution.