Windows 10 memory management

[Damodred]

Hello

Upgraded to Windows 10 couple of days ago and basically I'm now running out of memory. Before the upgrade (from Windows 8.1) the common memory usage at idle was around 3,0gb, with 12-13gb available ram and about the same in cached.


At boot there is usually 1,5-2gb used. After a few hours it sits at 11,5gb, 4,3gb available, 4,0gb cached and about 8,7gb Non-paged pool. According to MSI Afterburner there is also 12,7gb in Pagefile usage.

I don't really mind "using" my hardware, but is this intentional? I fired up Skyrim and managed to play for about 30 minutes before I ran out of RAM and the pagefile broke the 25gb limit (heavily modded game...) so it doesnt seem like the OS kicks out programs or files stored in memory when a new program needs it.

Here are some images at idle to show what I'm talking about

System specs:

Intel i7 4771
Gigabyte motherboard
16gb RAM
Sandisk 240gb SSD
Radeon R9 290X x2 in Crossfire
Corsair RM750 psu

Thanks in advance!

 

[Deleted member 245375]

There's something seriously wrong with your installation, it doesn't take a tech guru to understand that from your description of the situation. I know you're going to absolutely hate me for saying this but but but... I'd say do the following:

- image your current installation any way you're able (True Image, Clonezilla, Macrium Reflect, or any number of other imaging/backup utilities) - a bit for bit copy of the entire installation you have right now for safe keeping (assuming you have some storage space to put it, figure it'll take about 50-60% of the current size due to compression)

- do a clean installation of Windows 10 (which you can now do easily because you've completed the upgrade which is the requirement and how Windows 10 is offered for free) - you will not (or at least you should not) be required to put in a Product Key at all - you'll be prompted for one twice: the first time click the Skip button and the second time click the "Do this later" link

- when the installation is done, get online and it'll hit Windows Update for anything that's available and my suggestion is to use as many of the drivers provided by Windows Update as you can or as many as provided and only those drivers - if you have a piece of hardware that doesn't get a driver from Windows Update, then and only then should you use one from the hardware manufacturer for the given device

- install some of your most commonly used apps and while doing that and making use of them keep an eye on the RAM usage to see if anything goes haywire like the situation you're seeing now with the upgraded installation

- test that situation out for a day or two installing more stuff, and so on

Based on what you stated, I would suspect something that was on the drive prior to the upgrade to Windows 10 is now borking it - it could be a driver, it could be an app, it could be a single DLL file that was coded poorly, it could be any number of things really but I wouldn't lay the blame on Windows 10 itself, especially if doing a clean install doesn't result in such crazy RAM usage.

Also, there's a tool called RAMMap from Microsoft that can show you graphically what the hell is actually using the RAM and I mean down to RAM usage per file, all of them. It can get complex fast but luckily you can sort the columns by counts (like you did with the Task Manager shot above) so, you can use RAMMap now on the upgraded installation and it'll provide you a lot more info than Task Manager could ever dream of including what's cached in RAM and for how long it's been cached.

RAMMap can surprise you sometimes, you may find files that have been cached in RAM for weeks, even months because that's how Superfetch is/was designed to work.

But those are my suggestions so far: I'm confident that with some troubleshooting one step at a time you can find what's causing the crazy RAM usage. I don't think it's Windows 10 directly, I think there's something that's not compatible with Windows 10 and might need to be updated (if such an update is or will be made available).

Good luck.

 

[Damodred]

Thanks for the quick reply!
I agree, its probably a driver or something similar causing all the trouble. I'll do a clean installation tomorrow and see what happens!
But as far as I can tell, nothing monumental in Windows memory management has changed (like the change from XP to Vista)?

Thanks again

 

[Damodred]

Just wanted to update incase someone else runs into the same problem:

Apparantly there is an issue with Windows 8.1 (and Windows 10) and the network card called "Killer E2200 Gigabit" which comes with several motherboards.

The issue is that all data that has been recieved will, for unknown reasons, stay in RAM and also the pagefile until reboot. The solution is to make a change in the registry by following these few steps:

https://bluebluewave.wordpress.com/...00-and-windows-network-data-usage-monitoring/