Where did my memory go?

murphyrg · 04 Feb 2015

I installed a Samsung 850 Evo SSD over the weekend and as expected, my Dell E5530 is generally much more responsive. But in checking my performance numbers, however, I seem to be using much more of my 4GB of RAM than I was last time I looked. In fact, with several windows open, I'm at about 90% usage. Looking at the running processes listed, iexplore is always the biggest user, but the individual usages never add up to anywhere close to the 3+GB being used. I've read other similar posts and tried things like disabling add-ons, but that does very little.

As you can see from the attached screenshot, I'm using 75% of my RAM with only Explorer open and a couple of tabs running in that program.

Any ideas? Could it possibly have anything to do with the settings for the solid state drive?

Thanks

**cluberti** · 04 Feb 2015

Look in Resource Monitor, and if you want more detailed stats, use RAMMap and VMMap from sysinternals. There are many different kinds of virtual memory in Windows, so programs that show "memory usage" without denoting what kind of memory is being used are junk in my opinion - memory usage in Windows is not necessarily the same as physical RAM usage, because processes and programs do not have any insight into the physical memory on the machine, only the memory manager does.

LMiller7 · 04 Feb 2015

Post a screenshot of Windows Task manager - Performance tab.

murphyrg · 06 Feb 2015

Thanks for the replies. Below is a screenshot of my unit with just 3 tabs open in Internet Explorer and the Paint program also open.

whs · 06 Feb 2015

What startup programs do you have running in the background. For a test, disable all of them and see what happens.

**cluberti** · 06 Feb 2015

Might want to give RAMMap a try, as I mentioned earlier. It will tell you where your physical memory is going, down to the process level.

LMiller7 · 06 Feb 2015

The problem appears to be in the Nonpaged kernel memory. 1223 MB for this is a huge value. Most likely this is caused by a driver problem.

whs · 06 Feb 2015

LMiller7 said:

The problem appears to be in the Nonpaged kernel memory. 1223 MB for this is a huge value. Most likely this is caused by a driver problem.

Excellent observation.

**cluberti** · 06 Feb 2015

You could use poolmon to figure out what tag(s) are consuming memory.

murphyrg · 08 Feb 2015

I appreciate all the input, and being a computer idiot I'm trying to proceed, but I'm a bit out of my depth here. In watching a video on the use of RAMMap, the presenter reinforced the astute observation by lmiller7 that my nonpaged kernel memory was very high and that it was likely a driver related memory leak. And I follow that poolmon might allow me to ID the tag(s) that are related to my issue, but I'm not certain what to do after that is done - simply reload the related driver?

And not knowing how a "memory leak" behaves, I'm not certain that it is my issue. When starting, the physical memory usage climbs to about 60% and holds there indefinitely. The primary users listed in the process tab are iexplore.exe*32 and svchost.exe. Once I open a program like Explorer, the physical memory climbs to about 80 to 90%, depending on how many windows I open. Does this behavior seem like a driver memory leak, and is there a simpler way for the clueless to ID the offending driver?

Thanks,