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Running out of RAM

SL2

SL2

Joined
Jan 27, 2006
Messages
2,568 (0.36/day)
I'm trying to fix a laptop, it's chews up RAM like nothing when idle. It happens sometimes a few days after restart, never on the first day.

Closing programs doesn't do much, see image. mdsched found nothing. Sometimes it drops down to normal levels after an hour or so, although not a given. I have no idea what is causing this, I'd guess it's a memory leak.

"Just sort by memory usage" got me absolutely nowhere lol. Is there anything else I can do before reinstalling the shit out of it?


Lenovo Y50-70
CPU: 4710HQ
GPU: 860M & igp
16 GB RAM
1701114603871.png
 
Im guessing you have some sort of malware? I have seen Adobe and other apps now that I think of it do Auto Creations while at idle. This uses a ton of resources and can be stopped. Could be that too I guess.
 
Nothing like a good drive wipe to fix all your problems.
 
Id start with updating network and sound drivers. What is RAMMap64.exe?
 
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backup and go fresh install , get out this nightmare before it starts
 
Try stopping and disabling SysMain service - that's what Superfetch is called nowdays.
 
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What happens if you turn all "fast boot" and "hibernate" things off.

I used to have a laptop using fast boot , hibernate and such, every time I started up the laptop it's memory usage would increase, I fixed it by disabling all this.
 
Princess Garnet said:
You have a paged pool memory use of almost 34 GB. This isn't just unusually high; it's obscenely high. This is where your memory use is going.

You need to find out what (likely a driver) is consuming (likely leaking) all of this memory. You can use Poolmon to identify this.

learn.microsoft.com

Troubleshooting Pool Leaks Part 2 – Poolmon

learn.microsoft.com
Click to expand...
Yeah, obscene is the word. Didn't know about Poolmon, thanks for the tip.

P4-630 said:
What happens if you turn all "fast boot" and "hibernate" things off.

I used to have a laptop using fast boot , hibernate and such, every time I started up the laptop it's memory usage would increase, I fixed it by disabling all this.
Click to expand...
Fast boot is off, and the issue can appear before using Hibernate or even Standby.

I really appreciate all the help I've been getting, but the thing is that I can only try a couple of suggestions per week, given the time it takes for the problem to show up.
 
You almost 100% have a driver leak. Or some lower level application but it's a leak for sure. The fact that your paged pool use is that high, and the fact that you say it shows up after time, is a strong indicator.

Poolmon should help you narrow down what driver is claiming the high memory use. From there, either update the driver, or if it's already at the latest version, maybe try downgrading it or disabling the device. But you'll at least know the cause.
 
If there's any driver I suspect it's Nvidia, I've had problems with it on this one and changed the driver before. On the other hand, since the issue persisted after a driver change, maybe it's something else causing this.
 
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SL2 said:
If there's any driver I suspect it's Nvidia, I've had problems with it on this one and changed the driver before. On the other hand, since the issue persisted after a driver change, maybe it's something else causing this.
Click to expand...
Memory leaks are often caused by the operating system itself.
 
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Reinstalling Windows is, or should always be a last resort, last ditch effort. For one it often does not fix the issue. For another, if it does fix the issue, you don't learn what caused it in the first place in order to prevent it from occurring again.

If you have dinked with your page file setting, change it back to the defaults and just let Windows manage it. Contrary to what many want us to believe, Windows knows how to do it very well.

HOWEVER, for a page file to work properly, there needs to be sufficient free space on the drive. How much free disk space do you have? I like to keep at the very least 20GB free, more than 30GB is preferred. This amount is NOT dependent on the total size of the drive. In other words, it is not based on some percent.

Run Windows Disk Cleanup (or CCleaner if you already have it) to clean out the clutter.

Unplug all connected USB devices (except keyboard and mouse), then reboot and see how it goes.
 
Bill_Bright said:
Reinstalling Windows is, or should always be a last resort, last ditch effort. For one it often does not fix the issue. For another, if it does fix the issue, you don't learn what caused it in the first place in order to prevent it from occurring again.

If you have dinked with your page file setting, change it back to the defaults and just let Windows manage it. Contrary to what many want us to believe, Windows knows how to do it very well.

HOWEVER, for a page file to work properly, there needs to be sufficient free space on the drive. How much free disk space do you have? I like to keep at the very least 20GB free, more than 30GB is preferred. This amount is NOT dependent on the total size of the drive. In other words, it is not based on some percent.

Run Windows Disk Cleanup (or CCleaner if you already have it) to clean out the clutter.

Unplug all connected USB devices (except keyboard and mouse), then reboot and see how it goes.
Click to expand...
I won't do anything until the problem comes back, otherwise I'll never know what was wrong. The paged pool is currently 556 MB so I just have to wait.
The issue will possibly come back before friday, I'll leave it on until then.

When that happens I will (not related to each other, necessarily):
1 - Run poolmon and look for obscenities, I've got all 5.8 GB installed and working.
2 - Stop sysmain.

As I've never experienced any chrashes because of this I'm in no hurry to fix it, I can wait a month if needed as it doesn't bother me in any other way.
I'm eager to figure out what's going on, this is a first for me.
 
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The memory chugging kicked in today, I checked with poolmon and figured it out. I have the same problem as this one.

When looking for info I saw a lot of dead ends, people who never could figure it out. Here I saw some more info about what to do, although I never got to try it myself.

The cause for this was a small program I made that runs in the background (audio related). I will have a look at it later on, but I'm glad I didn't reinstall! That would have been a waste of time.

I disabled some Startup Event Trace Sessions earlier, do they have to be reactivated?


Thanks everyone for the help!
 
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Princess Garnet said:
This is why I'm not a fan of jumping on the "reinstall Windows" nuclear option right out the gate, because while that certainly might solve the issue (especially at first), you don't know what caused it or if it might come back. It's a good option as a last resort.
Click to expand...
What sometimes happens: after hours of trying to solve something, no solution is found. Sometimes it is faster to do a re-installation but it depends on the situation.
You can install most Linux systems in about 5 minutes. Installing windows also doesn't take particularly long how I remember it.
 
I've installed more than a hundred times ever since W2000, and many times I've done it directly without trying to figure out what's going on, but in the end it always depends on what's wrong.

This time it was different. It pretty much always takes three days before it goes wrong, and I just got too curious to let it go.

Can anyone guess why this code would cause memory leaks in Windows, but only after three days? I'm no expert.. :D The program itself never uses more than 4 MB.

1701436240540.png
 
SchumannFrequency said:
What sometimes happens: after hours of trying to solve something, no solution is found. Sometimes it is faster to do a re-installation but it depends on the situation.
You can install most Linux systems in about 5 minutes. Installing windows also doesn't take particularly long how I remember it.
Click to expand...
That's true, but there's often times a lot of post-install setting up that some of us do (perhaps not everyone), and either doing that or configuring those installations to image all the time is typically a lot more work in and of itself.

I like to defer that option until after I've exhausted other options, personally. But I might feel that way because I haven't run into many situation where I've even needed to consider reinstalling Windows to begin with, and the one exception to this is an issue where reinstalling Windows didn't resolve it anyway.

I have a lot of history having to reinstall Windows XP often. Windows 7 and Windows 10? Those installations lasted me forever.
 
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SL2 said:
I disabled some Startup Event Trace Sessions earlier, do they have to be reactivated?
Click to expand...
No. But here's my general philosophy when troubleshooting or just when tweaking and dinking to see what happens: If I change a default setting and I don't see any improvement, I restore the default. I don't leave the change. Why?

Contrary to what some want everyone else to believe, the teams of 100s (1000s?) of PhDs, computer scientist and professional programmers at Microsoft, and their combined centuries of experience and their 10s of exabytes of empirical data to draw upon, really do know what they are doing. It is just with all that brainpower, experience, data and supercomputers to crunch with, they still cannot account for each and every one of the 1.6 billion "unique" scenarios and Windows computers out there.

It is important to remember that every Windows computer becomes a unique computer within the first few minutes of the very first boot (even 2 identical computers coming off the same assembly line, one right after the other) - this as users setup their own networking, security, hardware configurations, accounts, personalizations, applications, peripherals, etc.

So if changing the default does improve things fine. Leave it. But if no improvement is seen, change it back to the factory default setting.

SL2 said:
Can anyone guess why this code would cause memory leaks in Windows, but only after three days? I'm no expert..
Click to expand...
I'm not either. I'm a electronics technician, not a programmer (and that's by choice). But I did find this: SoundPlayer causing Memory Leaks? that looks pretty similar to your situation, even though that post is from 13 years ago. It might give you, or someone who is a real programmer, a clue.

In any case, please keep us posted.

SchumannFrequency said:
What sometimes happens: after hours of trying to solve something, no solution is found. Sometimes it is faster to do a re-installation but it depends on the situation.
Click to expand...
As the Princess noted, and as I noted previously in post #18 above, it is not always about getting the system back up and running quickly, it is about learning what happened so it can be prevented from happening again - this is true even after hours of exhaustive troubleshooting.

W7/10/11 are not like XP and earlier versions and should not be treated the same way. I note "format and reinstall" was almost a "matter of routine" back in those days. But not anymore.

Running a repair, or restoring from a "known good" image backup (especially if "time is money") would be MUCH BETTER options to perform before "reinstalling" the OS. Just beware, regardless if doing a repair, restore from image backup, or a full reinstall, it is not uncommon for users to then reinstall the problem back too by copying back their saved (but infected or corrupt) personal files and programs - putting them right back where they started with a broken machine and not know the cause. :(
 
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