Why does my system show lots of memory being used when the total amount is way less t

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lachdanan

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 3, 2012
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I don't know if the title makes sense but Windows reports 7GB of memory being used but when I check the task manager I don't anything close to this amount being used. Here is the pic where the apps are sorted from max to min memory:

Q0TWxfY.png


It started a couple of days ago and now internet seems very slow, chrome behaves very slow. Lots of RAM is shown to be used. Copying/moving files seems much slower.

I don't know what's going on. Any way to fix this?
 
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Snufykat said:
Sounds like it could be a virus infection.
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And you determined this how..?

Memory can be used by more than just processes. You most likely have a driver that is using a large chunk of kernel memory. Use RAMMap or poolmon to determine what the culprit is.
 
I would start by killing chrome and see how many GBs of ram that frees. It appears to be using over 2GB of ram from the info you have posted.
 
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I had this issue on my sons computer. Took me forever to figure out what it was as Poolmon and the like didn't really give me a lot of information (or perhaps I just wasn't using it correctly). Anyway, for me it ended up being an issue related to our AMD video card driver. I uninstalled it and installed the newest version and that fixed it.

Hopefully yours will be something easy like this.
 
Also Windows SuperFetch caches commonly used data in RAM, since unused RAM is wasted RAM.
 
face2palm said:
Maybe close some Chrome tabs? :eek:
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Add-in's use their own process, as well. Could be a single tab and Chrome has a ton of add-in's running.

I'm guessing it's showing as Used, but a lot cached (Superfetch). This can be given away to any process that needs it, but speeds things up. Better than having 32GB RAM, and only using 2GB and having that other 30GB just sitting there doing nothing. Might as well use it.
 
Snowknight26 said:
Task Manager does not report that as used memory. While true, that doesn't help explain the discrepancy.
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Look at how many Chrome tabs are open, you can't trust anyone with that many tabs open. We have no idea if the OP is looking at used or cached values for the memory :p
 
ocellaris said:
Can't tell if this is a joke thread or not...
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I still can't tell myself and I'm trying to be serious.

face2palm said:
Maybe close some Chrome tabs? :eek:
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Ding ding! Seriously, browsers are notoriously leaky and add-ons make things eve more complex the more tabs you open. I have yet to run one web browser that I don't have to CTRL+ALT+DEL once a week to remove it from running when I closed it.

A web browser is almost as complex as a modern day OS. Sometimes a good ole reboot or draining the memory and restarting works wonders. It cracks me up that people this day and age never close the browser from the moment the computer is on to the moment it turns off. My sister would go for weeks and then blame her stupid computer when all I did was close it and restart the dumb thing.
 
No guys this is not a joke. I understand chrome can use a lot but for me when it does it shows the total amount. I restarted the computer and chrome too. Even after exiting chrome, it still showed very high usage, I didn't get much return.

I think it was bvckup program that I am using. It was copying 2000 files and I think it started using a lot of RAM. Now seems better.

I tried RAMMap and it showed private processes were taking the amount.
 
Okay, after getting my new box up, even though I had more memory (had 8 on the old system had 12 on the new), I was getting out of memory errors overnight.

And Task Manager was nowhere CLOSE to accounting for it.
I wound up cutting SQL Server down, first to 4GB, then 2GB, simply because I couldn't seem to control the memory usage. The only thing that fixed it was a reboot.

After the patches I applied last night however, memory seems to be a bit more under control. Haven't had a chance to see EXACTLY what I absorbed last night.
 
@Liger: The app's name is silly but it's a backup program like dropbox but offline, so it mirrors my files to other drives. Really awesome but didn't expect this.
 
Snowknight26 said:
And you determined this how..?

Memory can be used by more than just processes. You most likely have a driver that is using a large chunk of kernel memory. Use RAMMap or poolmon to determine what the culprit is.
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Based on the info provided, it could be damm near anything.
 
lachdanan said:
I think it was bvckup program that I am using. It was copying 2000 files and I think it started using a lot of RAM. Now seems better.
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What you appear to have is a memory leak in a file system driver. Bvckup acts merely as a trigger (as it has no kernel component), meaning that the same thing can be triggered by any other app that does some intensive I/O. If you have any sort of "virtual' or "cloud" drives, emulated storage devices and some such - their drivers are likely to be the source of the issue.

As other have said, get one of the SysInternals utilities and looks at the details. But if you don't see any process in Task Manager using missing memory, then it *is* in the kernel.

* I wrote Bvckup 2.
 
Hi vacherin, thanks for replying. Sorry I think I might be wrong. Some of the copied files showed to take a lot of memory so I thought it's bvckup.

Anyway here is the screenshot that might reveal more info. I just did ctrl+alt+del and I see massive missing memory. Please take a look at the screenshots. I have firefox open with maybe 30 tabs.

hrJf6h6.png




s24t0Zy.png


Why do files that I closed (vampire warriors) still take memory? And what's that MKV file in the recycle bin (mine's empty) take that much space in memory?
 
lachdanan said:
Why do files that I closed (vampire warriors) still take memory? And what's that MKV file in the recycle bin (mine's empty) take that much space in memory?
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That's normal Windows file caching in action. This memory will be reclaimed by the Memory Manager as soon as any process will need some memory and Windows won't have any readily available. Google for "Windows Memory Manager Standby List".
 
Thanks alot. Even the 5.7GB file? Because that seems excessive and I don't like seeing my memory used a lot. I am working in visual effects and seeing my total memory used without anything open makes me uneasy. I just wanna be able to save as much memory possible because volumetric effects take all the memory I have.

Btw bvckup app rocks, using it all the time :)
 
lachdanan said:
Thanks alot. Even the 5.7GB file? Because that seems excessive and I don't like seeing my memory used a lot. I am working in visual effects and seeing my total memory used without anything open makes me uneasy. I just wanna be able to save as much memory possible because volumetric effects take all the memory I have.

Btw bvckup app rocks, using it all the time :)
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You are completely missing the point. Windows loads files you may use into RAM to save you time if you use those files. This has no effect on running programs and such, the files being held in RAM "just in case" get ejected immediately when something else needs to be in RAM. You aren't "saving" memory by having more space in RAM available.
 
I understand but it didn't use to do this until a couple days ago. And how is putting a giant movie file into memory will help me? It's hardly unlikely I will watch it again.

I am just surprised windows started doing this now. Before it only showed exactly what the programs used in task manager.
 
lachdanan said:
I understand but it didn't use to do this until a couple days ago. And how is putting a giant movie file into memory will help me? It's hardly unlikely I will watch it again.

I am just surprised windows started doing this now. Before it only showed exactly what the programs used in task manager.
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It has been doing this in one way or another unless you turned off SuperFetch. You are just suffering from a case of over analyzing normal Windows behavior and creating a problem out of it from lack of understanding.
 
I thought superfetch was only on if you don't use SSD for your OS drive. So it should be off for me all the time.
 
lachdanan said:
I thought superfetch was only on if you don't use SSD for your OS drive. So it should be off for me all the time.
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In theory it should be off for SSDs and on for spinning HDDs on a Windows 8 PC. In pratice, something is loading that MKV file into RAM.
 
I hope those movie files are the way you named them after ripping your own copies. Otherwise you have just openly admitted to piracy through that image, as it is common practice for pirated movies to be named in this fashion. In particular, the "-chd" and "-don" suffixes represent torrent release groups.
 
Thanks that gave me a clue. Maybe it's KMP player which I updated yesterday. Time to uninstall that and switch to another player. This is annoying. But definitely seems like it's doing that.
 
Looks like you torrent a lot of your software. If you're a dev, you better hope noone ever bothers to check your licensing.
 
lachdanan said:
I understand but it didn't use to do this until a couple days ago. And how is putting a giant movie file into memory will help me? It's hardly unlikely I will watch it again.
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You might think differently if you were editing it.
 
lachdanan said:
Yes but that's still a minority case, right? Of all windows users, a very small amount of people would do that.
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Yes but if you opened the file and you have free ram available it will cache it. Often people open and close the same things repeatedly during a day so it makes sense.
 
What you see in taskmanger process list is the "privat working set" as default
you can add more columns showing different memory types of usage

What you see under performance is commit size. Those two are not the same
E.G if you tell all your process to shrink to minimum size you will see the working private set shrink but the commit size will remain the same.

TLDR: There is lot of different ways/modes a memory can be used.
 
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