RAM build up / leak

fenrir0wulf · 16 Oct 2020

Hey all, so my work computer has an issue where if I leave the computer open for too long, the RAM usage will simply build up continuously. This is to the point where I will start having difficulty working with some of my more RAM intesnive applications (Davinci Resolve, Photoshop, VMware and the like) to the point where they will simply crash from running out of memory space. I've taken screenshots of my Rainmeter over 2 days to show (for the record, Rainmeter simply shows the exact same stats as written in the task manager).

RAM build up / leak-2020-10-15-08_14_22-window.png

RAM build up / leak-2020-10-15-16_41_44-window.png

RAM build up / leak-2020-10-16-08_02_15-window.png

I've looked at some other threads and the other thing I've noticed is that the task manager is reporting an abnormally high paged pool.

RAM build up / leak-2020-10-16-08_56_14-task-manager.png

Now obviously, the issue "gets resolved" when I restart the computer, however, I frankly feel I shouldn't need to restart more than once a week. As it stands right now, I need to restart every single day, otherwise, anything RAM intensive will straight up crash or Blue Screen. Also, this issue is not present on some of my other computers (though I will need to check closer).

Here are the specs of the computer I'm having problems with.

RAM build up / leak-2020-10-16-09_11_15-speccy.png

Windows 10 2004

Any ideas?

W10 Tweaker · 16 Oct 2020

I noticed the memory utilization would creep up constantly on my PC and given that I restart infrequently I wanted another solution.

Then I stumbled on a portable app on Ten Forums called Mem Reduct. This allowed a quick re-initializing of memory and reduced the the volume of memory in use.

Mem Reduct

Download Mem Reduct - MajorGeeks

This is this morning before running clean memory function.

RAM build up / leak-1016-mem-reduct-pre.jpg

This is immediately after running the clean memory function.

RAM build up / leak-1016-mem-reduct-post.jpg

Your paged pool and non-paged pool amounts are much larger than mine. More investigation might be prudent. I'll poke around if nobody posts sooner than later.

UPDATE:

According to things I've read, paged and non-paged memory usage are managed by Windows and directly related to the drivers loaded on the system. Non-paged memory is always occupying physical memory space, is not written to disk, and is to my knowledge, should always smaller than paged memory.

The size of both paged and non-paged memory is directly proportional to the amount of memory contained in the PC. I have 12GB so my stats will be smaller than yours if you have more memory.

This Nirsoft tool will allow you to view the drivers that are currently loaded and contributing to these stats. You may identify and remove some older drivers that are no longer required and using resources.
Be sure to hide the Microsoft drivers in order to reduce the amount of displayed results.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/driverview.html

W10 Tweaker · 16 Oct 2020

Nirsoft Driverview.

Displaying all loaded drivers.

RAM build up / leak-1016-nirsoft-driverview.jpg

Display after selecting 'Hide MS Drivers'.

RAM build up / leak-1016-nirsoft-driverview-wo-ms.jpg

steve108 · 16 Oct 2020

Hello @fenrir0wulf,

This should drop the answer into your lap rather quickly if not solved yet:

Download and run Process Explorer (from M$) as admin, then
View, Select Columns check the Paged and Nonpaged Pool columns from Process Memory tab,
then sort by Paged Pool column to see what process is consuming the GB.

FreeBooter · 16 Oct 2020

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...o/ba-p/1675369

fenrir0wulf · 20 Oct 2020

Hey all, sorry for the delay in answering. I'm off early on Fridays and don't work on Mondays (because of school schedule). But I believe I've found the culprit.

So I had a look at the Mem Reduct thing. and while it worked for active RAM, it did absolutely nothing for the paged pool (and you can even see it in the screen shots here) so it was clear it was not the solution I needed. So with that I had a look at the Driverview thing (I did have RAMMap btw, but i didn't find it explicit enough to give me the solution).
It turned out my graphics driver was at the top of the list. Since I was still on 19.Q4 (AMD FirePro), I decided to see if updating the driver could tell me something.
And tell it did. Once the driver got reset for a clean install, all RAM usage dropped to as low as 10%. So I think it's pretty clear that this was what was building up.
Now the reason why I was still on 19.Q4 is because I had glaring issues with 20.Q1 at the beginning of the year (due to somehow making constant network usage) but that's a separate issue entirely.
I'll see what I can do with Process Explorer but if it continues, I'll probably just take it up with AMD directly.
I think this is pretty much case closed for this.

W10 Tweaker · 20 Oct 2020

fenrir0wulf said:

Hey all, sorry for the delay in answering. I'm off early on Fridays and don't work on Mondays (because of school schedule). But I believe I've found the culprit.

So I had a look at the Mem Reduct thing. and while it worked for active RAM, it did absolutely nothing for the paged pool (and you can even see it in the screen shots here) so it was clear it was not the solution I needed. So with that I had a look at the Driverview thing (I did have RAMMap btw, but i didn't find it explicit enough to give me the solution).
It turned out my graphics driver was at the top of the list. Since I was still on 19.Q4 (AMD FirePro), I decided to see if updating the driver could tell me something.
And tell it did. Once the driver got reset for a clean install, all RAM usage dropped to as low as 10%. So I think it's pretty clear that this was what was building up.
Now the reason why I was still on 19.Q4 is because I had glaring issues with 20.Q1 at the beginning of the year (due to somehow making constant network usage) but that's a separate issue entirely.
I'll see what I can do with Process Explorer but if it continues, I'll probably just take it up with AMD directly.
I think this is pretty much case closed for this.

Good to hear you found a working solution. Thanks for the detailed update, that will likely help someone else in the future.