memory Advice on tracking down memory leaks?

dacid44 · April 18, 2021

Hi, I've been having an issue with my Windows 10 PC for a while now and finally decided I've reached the end of what I know how to do. For the past few months, I seem to have been having a memory leak somewhere on my system, but I can't seem to track down which program is the culprit. It doesn't seem to be based on any programs being opened that I've noticed, but after a while I start to notice programs glitching or lagging from low memory, and I have to stop what I'm doing and reboot, as my memory reaches 99% (of 16GB). However, task manager doesn't appear to show what programs are actually using that much memory (the displayed programs' memory usage doesn't total up to 99% of the 16GB I have in my system.) I would probably call myself a power user and tend to have various random programs running in the background (some of which I've written myself and it could very well be one of these), so one of these is most likely the culprit but I can't figure out which one. Is there an easier way to figure out which program(s) have the issue without simply uninstalling/stopping each one in turn and waiting the requisite hours it usually takes for the problem to appear? I've tried using SysInternals RAMMap, but I can't make heads or tails of the information it's actually giving me.

Specs:

-Ryzen 3600

-ASUS ROG Strix B450-F mobo

-Asus Strix GTX 1070

-16GB RAM (G.Skill)

-1TB Samsung 860 Evo

-2TB WD Blue HDD

-4TB WD Black HDD

I'll also list some of the programs I regularly use or have open in the background in case one of these has a well-known issue I haven't found:

-Various JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, Rider)

-Firefox (with pretty standard extensions: UBlock Origin, Dark Reader, OneTab, YouTube Enhancer)

-iTunes (occasionally but it's spaghetti so it probably doesn't help)

-Adobe Acrobat DC

-Rainmeter (NXT-OS)

-Discord

-Steam

-VoiceMeeter Banana

-Razer Synapse (if anyone has advice on getting this one to behave, it would be appreciated)

-TeamViewer

-WireGuard

-WSL

-Mouse Without Borders

-Overwolf

-ASUS' sound drivers/audio manager

-PowerToys

-Listary

-QTTabBar

This isn't exhaustive, but it's most of the programs I use regularly or have open in the background.

Any help or advice is appreciated, and I'm willing to add additional info if needed. Having to reboot in the middle of something I'm working on is kind of infuriating. Thanks!