Memory leak - not in process explorer

[sosotiit]

I have a win 7 64, asus M4 a785 MB with 4 GB RAM

I am trying to identify a memory leak. After a reboot I am typically at 1638 MB used and it gradually rises over a few days to about 3000MB used.

Now my problem is that if I open "Process explorer" (the one from systernal) and dump the usage and compare them, they are not changing.
SVChost, system explorer , mbam... all stay approx the same for a total load of 1240MB.
There is another approx 400MB used that grows to 1700MB and that I cannot track.
any others tools to diagnose the total memory and where it is used.

tia, soso

 

[richc46]

Welcome,

Nothing really new here in terms of what can be used, but rather detail explanations on how to use them.

Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? | ZDNet

 

[sosotiit]

Thks richc, they confirm what I had so far.
Whether it is ressources monitor or others prog the total load remains about the same between 1200 to 1300MB if we make the total of all line items,
but the total memory 'in use' increases with time up to 3000MB and it is not reflected in any of the processes memory usage.

thks, soso

 

[sosotiit]

what are the elements not covered under the processes?
-Driver
-kernel
...

how can I find their memory consumption?
could the sdk help?

tia, soso

 

[sosotiit]

Well, this is a painful one to diagnose.

the impact does not show in the processes (whether it is process mgr, process explorer...)

Rammap allows me to confirm it is in the "nonpaged pool" that the problem is.

so I found this topic "Tracking Pool Leaks" in this great article Pushing the Limits of Windows: Paged and Nonpaged Pool - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

and I can positively identify with "poolmon" that the culprit is an activity with a tag "CM44",
but when I search for that tag in either the driver directory or elsewhere I just cant find it. Must admit I am starting to run out of ideas?? any suggestions

tia soso

 

[sosotiit]

Ok I was able to take some screenshot of this
1) In the process tab all is fine

2) Rammap as you can see the nonpaged pool is 884012 K (rather than approx 169000K after a reboot).

3) in poolmon it shows CM44 (a nonpaged pool item) at 675000 K, and that is an item that was minimal ( 10 MB) after a reboot.

still trying to figure out what could be associated to tag cm44

soso

 

[jodamn]

Hey, I have the same problem running Win7 x64. Even with "nothing" running (which should show a commit charge of maybe 900mb) I'll randomly get 98% physical memory (4 gigs) used and extreme system slowdowns. I'll follow the steps above and see if I notice the same "CM44" tag.

 

[jodamn]

I don't know if there's any connection here but a similar problem is reported here:

Windows 7 General Memory Leak after long term usage.

Are you running nvidia drivers? this guy's problem was solved by rolling back to a previous version. I might have to try that...

 

[sosotiit]

thks for the info, in my case it is ATI, but maybe it is related to video drivers, I will try to locate another driver for my graphic chipset.
will come back with results, but doubt it will impact because I have that driver since I installed that motherboard and it was not doing this at first.
tks, soso

 

[sosotiit]

Resolved - Memory leak - not in process explorer

Ok it is resolved

Since this was not showing in process explorer but was visible in the nonpaged pool, it had to be closer to the OS or the drivers.
If it had been a driver, the cm44 would have appeared in searching the tag in %Systemroot%\System32\Drivers directory; so it had to be something related to OS.

The only apps that I replaced from the default OS functions were: defrag and the menu.

It was the later that caused the problem, I was using VistaStartMenu 3.60 and as soon as I deactivate it then the memory went back to normal. Did the update to version 3.67 and everything is fine. I used that apps for a long time with no prob, so that must be am isolate issue.

-soso

 

[richc46]

Glad that you could sort it out.