Extreme ram usage in win 10, for no reason? (99+%)

all drivers are the latest, old hardware slow driverupdates

Well ? Lets start at the beginning. Virus and malware scans all around. Update all drivers for everything. Clear bloatware. Examine processes for resource hogs and go take a look at event viewer. Shut access to the internet for windows store apps. Maybe take a look at your windows update status ?

ok, ran a complete virus/malware scan with no hits, had a few usb and ide drivers that were out of date, updated them, no bloatware (always installed my pc's from scratch) and the only program that hogs a bit of recourses is chrome.
The only way to make my nonpaged pool shrink is to force a shutdown by cutting power to the pc, otherwise it will stay high after shutdown/restart, so the nonpaged pool must be stored on disk between restart.

im still at a loss to why this happens, but i will do a hard shutdown and see if the problem persists. I really don't think that a old IDE driver was the problem, but you never know...

it could be one of windows built in processes - open resource monitor and check disk usage. See what is crunching your drive.

-- new firefox eats much less memory. (and they added multi-threading)

"Mozilla claims that Firefox also uses dramatically less memory than other competing browsers, with Chrome using 1.77x more RAM than Firefox in 64-bit and 2.44x in 32-bit mode. "

Thanks for the tip

Can confirm

Killer software is the devil

Op, keep the driver, delete the suite

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Never had any problems with drive usage, the problem is the ram usage, the nonpaged pool of my ram keeps getting bigger no matter what i do, anf the only way to reset it is to shut down by cutting power. normally im using ~3-6 gb of ram, but if i use it for a few hours it'd be stuck at 14+ gb even after restart, unless i just cut power instead of the normal shutdown...

Status right now:
no virus/malware
all drivers and programs are up to date
no heavy programs running in the background
the nonpaged pool in my ram gets bigger and doesnt reset with a normal shutdown/restart
windows search/superfetch and BITS are all disabled

Nonpaged pool right now is at 452 MB i will leave it running random youtube videos overnight in chrome and post how the ramusage look in the morning. Hopefully it can tell us something.

Reinstalling Windows doesn't sound like a bad idea now does it.

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The OP is ignoring all the remarks about the Killer Network suite...

I can confirm that if you have the full software for Killer installed, having extended network activity (such as downloading a large game) will make the system slowly run out of RAM.

The fix is to uninstall the suite and just install the bare driver for the NIC.

EDIT: And just to clarify: I have a Gigabyte GA-Z97X Gaming 3 motherboard with Killer NIC (Qualcomm® Atheros Killer E2201 LAN chip (10/100/1000 Mbit)), and used to suffer from this whenever I installed games, or after prolonged use. Once I uninstalled the suite and installed the driver, I haven't had the problem once.

You are using the awesome sysinternals tools so I would say next time its high non paged pool. Try vmmap on some suspect process's to see which has the memory usage. I would check out drivers.

i never installed the suite since its useless imo, and i can't stand bloatware. And it is the first time i've experienced this problem in the 4 years i've had the machine, and have never seen anything like it in the ~25 years i've had pc's. Normally i'd go straight after old drivers, malware and bloatware, but none of that is applicable here (except an old IDE and USB driver) so thats why i asked the hivemind of level1 techs :slight_smile:

And as it looks right now the problem is gone, and i have no idea why, nonpaged pool was at 395 MB when i closed chrome today, compared to the 452MB when i left it running last night, the only change have been updating of old IDE drivers and USB controller drivers, so im at a loss to why it happened...

All the sysinternal tools are stand alone .exe's from what I have seen. It doesn't get any more basic under fucking windows. !

I hope you fix your problem.

I have only seen that in game memory leaks, chrome, and malware. It is possible the drivers can cause the problem. May look and see what windows is force updating driver wise and shut of allowing windows to update drivers.

Last update:
Everything seems to be normal again, the memory leak have stopped, and ram usage is back to 16-40% depending on tasks. If only i knew the reason, the only thing that have changed since the problem arised is updated IDE and USB drivers, which i really can't believe was the problem...
Anyway, thanks for the help and suggestions.

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Glad it worked out :slight_smile:

I have seen that behavior if I run edge.

Same happening again for me... 7.3GB used (70MB compressed).

^somehow this doesn't add up... I never had issues before and I haven't had a major update forever :confused:

/edit
after quitting everything...

So yeah.... Windows pls?

Thanks this really help, i remove it completely and its back to normal usage.

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I have the Z97 version of that board, and while I don’t remember if I had any issues with memory leaks, it did cause a lot of performance problems in Cstrike and a handful of other online games.
Went away when I manually installed the Qualcomm AR8161 drivers.

According to some board partners and possibly Qualcomm proper, the E2200 driver problems are caused by the included software and not the ethernet driver it’s self, however I can tell you the E2200 management software running alongside the AR8161 drivers fixed those issues in my case, but the E2200 driver without the software did not improve things at all.
IIRC they’ve made it difficult to get the AR8161 generic driver package now, to stop people from installing it on their E2200s for whatever reason, but if you can find them, it’ll probably help to use those over the stock MSI E2200 drivers.

This topic is 4 years old already.
And i suppose that the said driver issues already fixed by now.

Feel free to start a new topic about it “if” nessesary.