Huge memory leak keeps crashing the system

[MussInBoots]

Hi,

I'm running the latest April update 1803 on my Acer nitro vn-791g. My problem is that my committed memory and paged pool climb up after 2-3 days of my laptop being turned on (with sleep mode at night). This reaches a point where the system hangs, browsing tabs crash repetitively and then it BSODs or force restarts. 

I have only noticed the problem recently but for some reason I've always had relatively high ram usage (50%) even when there are no open programs. However, this is only apparent when the system has being left on for some time. Cold reboots yield 35-40% RAM usage initially. Recently as mentioned, it became so severe that I cannot keep my system turned on for more than 3 days at best, before it crashes or I restart it. 

It's becoming super frustrating and I can't figure out what could be causing the huge memory. My network card is a qualcomm QCa61x4 since I heard network drivers might be a problem but I switched across drivers and that made no difference. 

I'm attaching taskmanager screenshots in a zip file of the problem and a cold reboot right after to see the difference.

Thank you.

High ram plus cold boot after.zip

[AresKrieger]

In all likelyhood the recent update to windows 10 botched the install causing the memory leaks as that has been a fairly common issue with past updates and this particular update was quite terrible in terms of reliability.

 

To fix it you would likely have to reinstall windows 10, in a clean install fashion. (no guarantees it would fix it though as I said this update is particularly terrible)

 

Also I'm not downloading a zip file to look at the specifics, I assume its just a single system operation eating the ram.

[Tabs]

Paged and non-paged pool is driver memory allocation. You have a bunk driver on your system causing this.

 

You can use a utility called Poolmon (once the memory usage is above normal) to discover the driver tag responsible, and from there, which specific driver is causing issues. If you're lucky there's an alternative available.

[Tabs]

2 minutes ago, AresKrieger said:

In all likelyhood the recent update to windows 10 botched the install causing the memory leaks as that has been a fairly common issue with past updates and this particular update was quite terrible in terms of reliability.

 

To fix it you would likely have to reinstall windows 10, in a clean install fashion. (no guarantees though as I said this update is particularly terrible)

 

While you might be anecdotally right about Windows feature updates causing issues, that is not the case here. If you don't have facts instead of conjecture you probably shouldn't post.

[MussInBoots]

Hi, thanks for replying, @AresKrieger, this problem was before the April update, but like I said, I managed to get a week atleast before things got really bad. But at this point it's just down right ridiculous as the heavy pagefiling is hitting my SSD hard unnecessarily. 

 

@Tabs, could please guide me in using poolmon? It's in the windows driver kit which I installed before in my search for an answer but I never really figured out how to use it.

 

PS: it's not merely my paged pool being high (reaching as high as 7-8gb), my committed simply runs out at 31.9GB and thats when it hangs and crashes. Also, I'd appreciate it if you guys look at the zip, I assure if it was obvious what was eating my RAM I wouldn't have come here. Nothing is eating the ram, literally nothing stands out. The ram usage doesn't even add up.

[Tabs]

5 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

Hi, thanks for replying, @AresKrieger, this problem was before the April update, but like I said, I managed to get a week atleast before things got really bad. But at this point it's just down right ridiculous as the heavy pagefiling is hitting my SSD hard unnecessarily. 

 

@Tabs, could please guide me in using poolmon? It's in the windows driver kit which I installed before in my search for an answer but I never really figured out how to use it.

 

PS: it's not merely my paged pool being high (reaching as high as 7-8gb), my committed simply runs out at 31.9GB and thats when it hangs and crashes. Also, I'd appreciate it if you guys look at the zip, I assure if it was obvious what was eating my RAM I wouldn't have come here. Nothing is eating the ram, literally nothing stands out. The ram usage doesn't even add up.

If you have a look at "High ram 2.png" from your file, you'll see that the reason your memory runs out is because the paged pool is more than 26GB. When pool sizes get that large it becomes harder and harder for memory to be freed; the rest of the memory is being used by running programs and the system. Eventually, it simply becomes impossible for Windows to keep freeing resources from running programs, and so your system slows to a crawl whilst everything gets paged to disk.

 

This problem becomes a lot worse when you have a small or disabled page file.

 

Here's a post where I helped someone with the same issue - 

 

If you need specific help/instructions or advice, let me know. 

[MussInBoots]

Alright that easy, thanks. I attached an image of the output.

[Tabs]

2 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

Alright that easy, thanks. I attached an image of the output.

In your case, you're looking for paged pool instead of non-paged pool, sorry about that. The command you'll need to use is poolmon /p /p /b (two /p)

[MussInBoots]

[Tabs]

3 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

 

 

Okay, so the tag you're looking for is dlma. This isn't a Windows driver, which is good, but it's also going to make it harder to find since it isn't included in the pooltag.txt file.

 

You'll need to run a search for that tag on your system and hope that you only find one or two hits.

 

On command prompt, change directory to C:\Windows and run findstr /m /l dlma *.sys

[MussInBoots]

I keep getting this error: FINDSTR: Cannot open *.sys

[Tabs]

4 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

I keep getting this error: FINDSTR: Cannot open *.sys

I'm sorry, I forgot that FINDSTR does not search subfolders - You'll need to change directory to system32\drivers and run it again. You got the error since there were no .sys files in C:\windows. There are more folders to check if you don't find anything there, but check that one first.

[MussInBoots]

[Tabs]

2 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

Those are the most likely cause. They are drivers included with encrypted removable drives, using software called "Deslock+". 

 

Unfortunately there are no alternatives to this if you absolutely need the software.

 

You'll be able to verify this is the cause by uninstalling it and rebooting your machine.

[MussInBoots]

I don't have that software installed. Apparently the process of the same name running under taskmanager links back to the ESET AV folder. I'm not sure why but apparently it's from there. I'll post on their forums and see what they think of this. But thank you so much nonetheless, this has been VERY helpful! 

 

I'll make sure to post back here with the results, in case anyone else also suffers from this. 

[Tabs]

2 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

I don't have that software installed. Apparently the process of the same name running under taskmanager links back to the ESET AV folder. I'm not sure why but apparently it's from there. I'll post on their forums and see what they think of this. But thank you so much nonetheless, this has been VERY helpful! 

 

I'll make sure to post back here with the results, in case anyone else also suffers from this. 

Good luck, glad to have helped.

 

If you don't have that exact software installed, you may have some other software installed that uses those same drivers. Once you find it, removing that software will fix your issues.

[Tabs]

13 minutes ago, MussInBoots said:

I don't have that software installed. Apparently the process of the same name running under taskmanager links back to the ESET AV folder. I'm not sure why but apparently it's from there. I'll post on their forums and see what they think of this. But thank you so much nonetheless, this has been VERY helpful! 

 

I'll make sure to post back here with the results, in case anyone else also suffers from this. 

Also, i just checked - https://www.deslock.com/ - it's now owned by ESET.

[MussInBoots]

Alright, I fixed it. Apparently DesLock+ was part of some data encryption feature from a different AV tier than the one I'm using. I uninstalled ESET fully and reinstalled it and the problem seems to be gone. Thank you so much again for all your help!