Very high physical memory usage with nothing open

Lozy · 12 Apr 2016

msconfig - disable all 3rd party software startups
ramMap, file explorer, nothing looks fishy
scanned system with ESET, malwarebytes, hitman
clean system with advanced system care and CC cleaner.
nothing helps a bit

just cant figure out what is eating up my rams, have been trying to solve this issue for almost one month then i decided to start a thread.
what actually could the the problem here or did i misunderstood how physical memory works ?

eLPuSHeR · 13 Apr 2016

For starters, you have a lot of Google Chrome instances opened. Is this normal?

CountMike · 14 Apr 2016

Chrome opens another instance with every tab opened, there's also few instances of Bluestacks etc. To check for real memory leaks, try turning off all those and other non essential programs from even starting.

Kari · 14 Apr 2016

One thing that caught my attention is that your second screenshot shows a process vmware-hostd.exe. Myself a Hyper-V fan and user I do not know VMware too well, but using my PC and Hyper-V as an example, this might explain something:

At the moment I am using 9.3 GB of my total 12 GB of RAM:

Very high physical memory usage with nothing open-2016_04_14_07_53_061.png

Checking the Task Manager, all running tasks, I am unable to find an explanation for this high RAM usage, although I get a hint by seeing that virtualization has several processes running:

Very high physical memory usage with nothing open-2016_04_14_07_56_322.png

The thing is, Task Manager does not show how much RAM my at the moment running virtual machines are using, the vm RAM usage is not shown as a process. To see that I need to check my Hyper-V Manager:

Very high physical memory usage with nothing open-2016_04_14_07_58_243.png

That's it; I now know that my RAM usage at the moment is pretty much as it should be, considering that I have two virtual machines using 6 GB at the moment.

The RAM used by my virtual machines is not shown in Task Manager, apart of it being included in total RAM at use at the moment.

I am of course totally aware that this might not explain your RAM usage but at least it gives reason to ask if you happen to have some virtual machines running in the background without you realizing or remembering it?

Kari

LMiller7 · 14 Apr 2016

Kari has made a good point, and I one that I suspect is often missed.

There are uses of memory, some of which can be quite large, that Task Manager tells us nothing about. One is the file cache, which incidentally is not included in the "Cached" value which is shown. Another is memory used for virtual machines. This will not be shown as being used by any of the virtual machine processes, at least not with any virtual machine software I am familiar with. This memory is allocated at a very low level by a device driver and cannot be traced to any process. The memory manager knows that this memory is not available but nothing more. As Task Manager obtains it's information from the memory manager it too knows nothing about this.

RAMMap will show more information but this is a sophisticated tool that requires considerable knowledge to make much sense of. I don't understand it very well.

Whenever you are running a virtual machine you should make a mental note of the memory it has been assigned and include it in whatever Task Manager is showing.

TairikuOkami · 14 Apr 2016

Lozy said:

what actually could the the problem here or did i misunderstood how physical memory works ?

This video explains, how memory management works (does not) in 10.

Memory Compression in Windows 10 RTM Channel 9

It is completely flawed, based on my experience and regular posts on this forum about memory problems.
I use CleanMem to free RAM (it helps with memory leaks), note that Windows cleans RAM, not Cleanmem.

For the record, I have just tried running without Cleanmem, I have soon realised, it was not a good idea.