Windows 10 & Eating my RAM...?

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 9:00am

Hi all,

First things first. I'm hardly tech savvy. I can get by, but I'm probably a scrub compared to the rest of you here. Please, be gentle. One of my first, if not my first, forum post so I apologize if I've bonked the format, or posted in the wrong area.

I tried, briefly, to consult Microsoft Chat for help with this but after a total of 50-someodd minutes of waiting and getting nothing accomplished... the guy "hung up" on me. So, here I am.

I'm running Windows 10, upgraded from 8.1 (bought legitimately). These past few days (and even right this very moment), I've been noticing unusually high RAM usage; Right now, I sit at 5.8GB out of 16 used according to Task Manager, and I have one Chrome tab open, and what I consider to be hardly anything running in the background; nothing that should be getting me up to almost 6GB of used RAM.

Last night, or the night before, I was watching a Twitch stream and not doing anything in the background... and I ended up using all 16GB and my computer henceforth failed to be of use to me. Every little mouse movement and it chugged; every keyboard input, chugged.

While I was "on hold" with the Microsoft schmuck, I was at 11.8GB. 40 minutes later, I was up to 14.9. And I had done nothing to warrant the increase. All I did was watch a Twitch stream while I waited for the guy to respond. I should note... that I went to shut down my computer... three times. Start, Power, Shut down. All three times, it put the screen in power save mode, never shut off, and eventually came back on BY ITSELF, as it was before I told it to shut off. I had to hold the power button on the case to force it to shut off. Rebooted, loaded, idled at 1.8-2GB.

From then until now, I haven't gamed or anything of the sort.

Forgive me, I always tend to write novels.

I ran sfc /verifyonly earlier, and it came back with "windows resource protection found integrity problems". I have no idea if this is related to my RAM issue whatsoever... but I have the log from that.

So... I don't know what to do. Below are the specs I can give you on my system off the top of my head. Any help is appreciated.

System info:

MB: ASRock Fatal1ty Z97x Killer
CPU: Xeon E3-1231 v3 (w/ 212 Evo)
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws X 1866, 2x8GB running @ 1600mhz
OS: Windows 10 Home, upgraded from 8.1
If you need other info, lemme know.

Garfield · August 3, 2015, 9:15am

Something I would add as an "advanced reading question" for your novel: Has the protagonist beeen able to reproduce the problem?

Revenshee · August 3, 2015, 9:16am

Can you post a picture of your "Processes" tab within the task manager? If its not a program listed there using all that RAM then its most likely a driver issue. A few other people have reported similar issues with RAM usage, the cause usually seems to be a memory leak from a driver.

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 9:39am

Definitively? No. At first, I thought it was related to my streaming my Xbox One to my computer as that's when I noticed it first. But then I noticed it earlier after I hadn't done so. Honestly, I have no clue what triggers it.

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 9:41am

See attached.

Raate · August 3, 2015, 9:44am

This link has someone saying they were having extreme memory problems, and the answer they received is pretty interesting. Go take a look. Apparently the solution worked for this guy, though I don't know if it will apply to you.

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 9:48am

Doing so now. I'll update with the results. Thank you! I'm glad you knew about this; Google searches gave me nothing relevant.

Raate · August 3, 2015, 9:48am

Something about a memory leak related to a problematic driver installation. The person that provided an answer went into detail on how to diagnose and repair the problem.

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 9:49am

@Revenshee mentioned that earlier, and a friend outside of this forum mentioned something similar to me yesterday when I brought it up. Hopefully that's all that it is and I can figure it out!

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 10:12am

Edit: Google searches are pointing to a "killer network interface card", of which I have Killer LAN built into my board... going to try updating my network drivers and see if that solves it. If not, I'll disable netio.sys...

Coming up as "netio.sys" being the culprit according to poolmon... But it's not in my system32 folder (hidden items is viewable). I tried using WPA to find the "AIFO" tag as described but... I can't find it; maybe I'm missing a step.

(Note, second SS was after system reboot... RAM has returned to "normal" for now.)

sumidor063 · August 3, 2015, 10:23am

I think I may have solved it... I disabled the "Killer Network Manager" program from running on start up, saturated Chrome with tabs, opened every game library I have (Steam, Origin, Battle.net, etc), TeamSpeak, GeForce Experience, etc. 6GB or so of RAM used. Then I closed everything and watched Task Manager and I'm back down to 2.4GB with one Chrome tab open and everything I had previously started, closed. Hopefully that's it... Thanks for the help guys. I never would've figured it out otherwise.

Raate · August 3, 2015, 10:27am

Hope you're able to get it sorted out.

Garfield · August 3, 2015, 10:36am

You confirmed my antipathy towards any kind of network management software that ships with wifi adapters or network cards which provide about 5% more features than Windows has out of the box.

sumidor063 · August 4, 2015, 3:40am

I thought I had it sorted... no such luck. I'm gonna redo my driver and see what's what.

aquanimus · February 24, 2016, 9:36pm

Hey guys, I am not sure if this problem got solved, but just disabling Killer Network didn't work for me.

This is a screenshot of my system. I am using like 200-300MB out of my total 8GB Ram (Intel Core i5-4670 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 64-Bit, Win 10, 120 GB SSD, 2 TB HDD).

I have no idea why this is happening to me, I can only tell you that I have been using the pc for now 2,5 years in the same configuration and recently did remove & replug it several times while reorganizing my room, but it has always been in the same place/room for the entire time and had no upgrades or anything. I even went so far and uninstalled unnecessary programs, but right now I get frame drops while playing League of Legends from 144 to 20, Chrome tabs take long to open, windows explorer menus take long... like everything is kinda "lagging" and the only thing that seems akward is the % of my RAM, but I have no idea on how to fix it.