Finding the program causing the memory leak

[Drake Jest]

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 

[Eigenvektor]

Some of that memory usage may simply be Windows caching things. Which is usually not an issue, because Windows will make that memory available to apps, if needed.

 

If one of the programs you're using has a memory leak, that should be visible pretty quickly. The memory usage of that program would increase until it consumes all available memory and your computer grinds to a halt as it starts to swap like crazy.

 

~edit: One way to observe it would be PerfMon (part of Windows). Set it up to record memory usage for all processes. If you find a process in the graph whose memory usage continuously increases you may have found a memory leak.

[Drake Jest]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

Some of that memory usage may simply be Windows caching things. Which is usually not an issue, because Windows will make that memory available to apps, if needed.

 

If one of the programs you're using has a memory leak, that should be visible pretty quickly. The memory usage of that program would increase until it consumes all available memory and your computer grinds to a halt as it starts to swap like crazy.

Here are some snippets

 

Image

Image

 

That does happen actually this problem was brought to my attention because of that like chrome and some app were refusing to function properly and was throwing errors because of insufficient ram. Back then restart bring it back to normal, but as of now i just have not reached that point yet the leak seems to be very slow like days slow. Because it would seem then im going back to that point again i would like to know whats causing it. What if its a driver thats causing it thats why it wont show up in the images

[SupaKomputa]

pooly made web pages can also leak memory, solution : close the tab.

open task manager, sort by memory size, rightclick -> close those with high memory usage.

[Drake Jest]

32 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

pooly made web pages can also leak memory, solution : close the tab.

open task manager, sort by memory size, rightclick -> close those with high memory usage.

 

 

Closing chrome helped a little but RAM usage is still high

[Eigenvektor]

Do you have any kind of disk caching software installed that caches contents in memory? You have 9.9 GB of memory (non-paged pool) that can't be swapped out to disk.

 

Try clicking on the "Open Resource Monitor" button at the bottom of the Performance tab of Task Manager. There should also be a memory tab that might give you a bit more detail. It would be good to have a screenshot of that, also.

[Drake Jest]

2 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Do you have any kind of disk caching software installed that caches contents in memory? You have 9.9 GB of memory (non-paged pool) that can't be swapped out to disk.

 

Try clicking on the "Open Resource Monitor" button at the bottom of the Performance tab of Task Manager. There should also be a memory tab that might give you a bit more detail. It would be good to have a screenshot of that, also.

No i do not have any such programs

 

Here is a snippet of the resource monitor

 

 

 

[PineyCreek]

Don't forget to check addons and extensions in Chrome (and Chrome apps, if those are still a thing).

[Eigenvektor]

Try sorting that by "Working set" "Private (KB)" so that the programs with the largest use show up at the top. And please include the "Physical Memory" section that should be at the bottom of that view.

[Drake Jest]

6 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Try sorting that by "Working set" "Private (KB)" so that the programs with the largest use show up at the top. And please include the "Physical Memory" section that should be at the bottom of that view.

 

I have closed chrome and took the snippet.

 

 

 

8 minutes ago, PineyCreek said:

Don't forget to check addons and extensions in Chrome (and Chrome apps, if those are still a thing).

 

I have closed chrome, yet the usage is still high. I do have some extention (darkmode and adblocker) but i dont think they run even if chrome is closed

[Eigenvektor]

You may have a bad driver which leaks pool memory. Install the Windows Driver Kit, run poolmon.exe and look which pooltag causes the high memory usage. If you found the tag, open the cmd prompt and run

findstr /s <Pooltag> *.sys

and look which driver is shown.

 

~edit: Here's an answer that may help you in a bit more detail: https://superuser.com/a/949246

[Drake Jest]

3 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

You may have a bad driver which leaks pool memory. Install the Windows Driver Kit, run poolmon.exe and look which pooltag causes the high memory usage. If you found the tag, open the cmd prompt and run

findstr /s <Pooltag> *.sys

and look which driver is shown.

they do not need a restart right? because it will refresh the memory making it dificult to look for the program

[Eigenvektor]

5 minutes ago, JakeQuinn said:

they do not need a restart right? because it will refresh the memory making it dificult to look for the program

Not sure, but I don't think there's another option. There's probably no other program that can see memory usage at the driver level.

 

~edit: Actually, there may be: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap

[Drake Jest]

Just now, Eigenvektor said:

Not sure, but I don't think there's another option. There's probably no other program that can see memory usage at the driver level.

Im downloading the neccesary programs, will comeback after everything is installed

[Eigenvektor]

4 minutes ago, JakeQuinn said:

Im downloading the neccesary programs, will comeback after everything is installed

See my edit, there may be a simpler solution

[Drake Jest]

9 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

See my edit, there may be a simpler solution

Which one should i look for? looking under the tabs the programs listed are generally the same as shown in  resource monitor

  

 

 

I have not stopped the download of Windows Driver Kit just incase

 

[Eigenvektor]

19 minutes ago, JakeQuinn said:

Which one should i look for? looking under the tabs the programs listed are generally the same as shown in  resource monitor

You probably want the "File Summary" tab, to see how much RAM each file is using. This should also show you files owned by drivers that are currently using a lot of memory, which may help to identify the driver that is causing issues.

[Drake Jest]

2 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

You probably want the "File Summary" tab, to see how much RAM each file is using. This should also show you files owned by drivers that are currently using a lot of memory, which may help to identify the driver that is causing issues.

 

Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Apologies that WDK is taking so long internet or the server seems to be very slow still at 11%

 

 

[Eigenvektor]

10 minutes ago, JakeQuinn said:

Nothing seems to be out of the ordinary. Apologies that WDK is taking so long internet or the server seems to be very slow still at 11%

No worries Hm, based on the screenshot, processes only make up for about 2-3 GB, and most of the memory resided in the non-paged pool. For some reason it doesn't seem to show up anywhere. I just found something else you could try:

 

Open task manager and switch to the "Details" tab. Then right click on the columns at the top and click on "Select columns". There should be a column called "NP pool". See if that shows a process with a high memory usage.

[Drake Jest]

17 minutes ago, Eigenvektor said:

Open task manager and switch to the "Details" tab. Then right click on the columns at the top and click on "Select columns". There should be a column called "NP pool". See if that shows a process with a high memory usage.

 

 

Notice the number one RzKLServices.exe even though it say 300MB. when i ended its process my RAM usage dropped to 5GB . And i think that did the trick. Looks like im uninstalling software from razer then. 

 

Does the remaining 1.1GB of non paged memory means something else is leaking ?

 

 

Thank you very much for the help good sir.

[Eigenvektor]

1 minute ago, JakeQuinn said:

 

 

Notice the number one RzKLServices.exe even though it say 300MB. when i ended its process my RAM usage dropped to 5GB . And i think that did the trick. Looks like im uninstalling software from razer then. 

 

Does the remaining 1.1GB of non paged memory means something else is leaking ?

 

Thank you very much for the help good sir.

You're welcome Might help to report that issue to Razer then, in the hope that they'll fix it in a future version. Or maybe check if there's a newer version that might already fix it. But yeah, if you don't really need it, uninstalling it is probably the best option.

 

Having some stuff in the non-paged pool is fine, 1.1 GB should be nothing to worry about. Maybe keep an eye out if it starts to increase again.

[Drake Jest]

1 minute ago, Eigenvektor said:

Having some stuff in the non-paged pool is fine, 1.1 GB should be nothing to worry about. Maybe keep an eye out if it starts to increase again.

I'll still let WDK finish downloading and install it might come in handy in the future.

 

Thanks you again sir !