Ram Leaking

[Kunni]

Over the last 3 months i have noticed after long gaming sessions and idle time, my RAM will be maxed out. When i restart i see the usage just climb and climb without doing anything. I will attach pictures of what my computer gets to after a day of being on at close to idle for it. Firefox does use some of it like 1GB, but i still think it should be lower than what it is. any input on why this is, already looked up some things to try and fix the issue maybe. This is a YouTube video i found on it. Will attach snapshots of my Usage.

 

System Specs:
CPU: i7 4790k
MOBO: MSI MSI Z97-G45
RAM: 32GB DDR3 
GPU: GTX 1080 Strix 
COOLING: Custom EK Loop
SSD: 500GB M.2 SSD 500GB Samsung Evo and 2TB HDD

OS: Windows 10 64-Bit

 

[SquintyG33Rs]

have you disabled superfetch?

[Kunni]

1 minute ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

have you disabled superfetch?

I did not but just did gonna give it a restart.

[Anghammarad]

Sorry not a helping post... but every time I read Ram Leak I imagine the mainboard in front of me, looking at the ram slots, and every now and then a 0 or a 1 drops down... 

 

Opening the case after some while and on the case bottom a small mountain of 0s and 1s... 

[Tabs]

Are you at a large amount of pool usage right now? Look at the docs about PoolMon (Microsoft.com) to determine which driver is allocating the memory. Paged and non-paged pool allocations are used by drivers, which makes it hard to find an exact culprit without tools like this.

 

If poolmon can find a specific driver or driver(s) that are causing the ram bloating, you can look for fixes, updates, or at least narrow down what hardware is causing the problems.

[Anghammarad]

1 minute ago, Tabs said:

Are you at a large amount of pool usage right now? Look at the docs about PoolMon (Microsoft.com) to determine which driver is allocating the memory. Paged and non-paged pool allocations are used by drivers, which makes it hard to find an exact culprit without tools like this.

 

If poolmon can find a specific driver or driver(s) that are causing the ram bloating, you can look for fixes, updates, or at least narrow down what hardware is causing the problems.

I would hint at a driver too...

 

My win 10s don't behave like that... all are intel paired with nvidia. My main system sometimes keeps running for a week without a reboot or shutdown and doesn't behave like that.

 

What also helps, shutting down all the background apps... you don't need steam, uplay, gog galaxy etc running all the time, only when you use them. as well as a lot of stuff which Win 10 tries to run in the background like the photo app which is running, even if you haven't clicked on it.

[Kunni]

8 minutes ago, SquintyG33Rs said:

have you disabled superfetch?

What does superfetch do exactly?

[Kunni]

8 minutes ago, Tabs said:

Are you at a large amount of pool usage right now? Look at the docs about PoolMon (Microsoft.com) to determine which driver is allocating the memory. Paged and non-paged pool allocations are used by drivers, which makes it hard to find an exact culprit without tools like this.

 

If poolmon can find a specific driver or driver(s) that are causing the ram bloating, you can look for fixes, updates, or at least narrow down what hardware is causing the problems.

Downloading it now, for every second that goes by its 1 MB in non-paged pool.

[Tabs]

Just now, Kunni said:

What does superfetch do exactly?

SuperFetch puts recently-accessed files and data into unused memory so that if the data is needed, it doesn't need to be read directly from disk. It's irrelevant in this case because superfetch adds to the "Cached" memory statistics on task manager, it does not add data to any of the paged or non-paged pools. Paged and non-paged pools are for drivers *only*.

 

For example, on my task manager, you can see I have 4.7GB of active (in-use) memory, and 8.1GB of files cached with SuperFetch. these are separate values from the paged and non-paged pool values which are shown below it.

[Kunni]

1 minute ago, Tabs said:

SuperFetch puts recently-accessed files and data into unused memory so that if the data is needed, it doesn't need to be read directly from disk. It's irrelevant in this case because superfetch adds to the "Cached" memory statistics on task manager, it does not add data to any of the paged or non-paged pools. Paged and non-paged pools are for drivers *only*.

 

For example, on my task manager, you can see I have 4.7GB of active (in-use) memory, and 8.1GB of files cached with SuperFetch. these are separate values from the paged and non-paged pool values which are shown below it.

So enable superfetch then? because at the moment it is off and staying off.

[Tabs]

Just now, Kunni said:

So enable superfetch then? because at the moment it is off and staying off.

Keep it off for now, I just wanted to explain why SuperFetch is *not* going to be the cause of this problem. It's 100% a driver issue, since SuperFetch memory usage shows up as "Cached".

[Kunni]

8 minutes ago, Tabs said:

Keep it off for now, I just wanted to explain why SuperFetch is *not* going to be the cause of this problem. It's 100% a driver issue, since SuperFetch memory usage shows up as "Cached".

After downloading and installing PoolMon i cant seem to find it in the folder it said it would install to or even find a name for it in the search bar. ideas?

[Tabs]

Poolmon is included with the Windows Driver Kit, if you installed that, it'll be in *installpath*/tools/x64/poolmon.exe. I don't recommend downloading it separately or from non-Microsoft sources, but that does mean downloading the *entire* kit, which is like ~800MB.

 

 

[Tabs]

Once you have access to it, open a command prompt as administrator and run poolmon /p /b, which will show you all your non-paged pool memory usage, sorted by highest first. You're looking for the 4-digit long code at the start of the line, which is known as a "pool tag" and identifies which driver is the main pool hog.

[Tabs]

If anyone finds this thread through a search or anything, the offending pool tag was Wfpn - netio.sys    - WFP NBL info container, which was leaking non paged pool due to the Killer E2200 network driver. The solution was to replace the driver with the compatible driver from the Microsoft catalogue for the Atheros equivalent E8161 and installing through Device Manager.