Troubleshooting Excessive Memory Use (Memory Leak?) after playing vid.

[jamiedolan]

HI;

I am having a problem with my memory getting tied up / used up and not being able to access it again until I reboot.

Machine: Dell xps studio 8100
OS: Win 7,
Processor: i7 2.8
RAM: 16GB (max it will take)
Video: ATI Radeon 5700 (running 3 monitors)
Versions: As far as I know I am running current versions of everything, including video drivers, flash, chrome, etc. (I've tried running Chrome with both the build in version of flash and the system version -haven't seen a difference)
Browser: I nearly exclusively run Chrome / Canary with auto-updates so am at the latest builds.​

What seems to cause me to use up / run out of memory is after I play videos (YouTube, Netflix, etc.), the memory seems to get used, but is not returned to the system, even if the browser is closed and re-opened.

Right now for example things are working fine; I rebooted my system a couple hours ago (but have not played any videos). I have Adobe Lightroom running, Picasa, Chrome and Canary (currently 4 web browser windows open with 52 tabs open). Task Manager currently shows me using 8.20GB of ram, that seems pretty reasonable to me.

Normally my system will keep running properly (if a program is closed, memory is freed up) right up until I start to play any videos (YouTube, Netflix, etc.) then it will start using up more memory. (Of course I expect it to use more memory during playback) However, even if I restart the browser, the memory does not get freed back up. For example, just prior to the reboot, with everything closed, I was using right around 8GB of ram. Once I rebooted, I was using 1.something GB of ram prior to opening any programs.

However, once I start playing some videos, I never seem to be able to get my ram freed back up again unless I reboot the whole system. This is not just a problem with how much memory the system shows as being available, I frequently actually run out of memory. (Task Manager will show me as using around 15GB and then everything starts swapping out like crazy).

I'm not a programmer, but to me, this seems like some sort of memory leak issue, perhaps from Flash?

Is there anything that I might be able to do other than to re-boot the entire system after I play a video to get the memory back again? We often use the computer as our TV and one of the monitors is playing something just about every night, so rebooting gets to really be a pain.

Thanks so much for your time.

Jamie Dolan

 

[A Guy]

Have you looked in Chromes own task manager to see if you can find a tab using excessive ram?

Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser

See if indeed closing the video tab actually deletes the listing from the task manager perhaps?

A Guy

 

[jamiedolan]

Have you looked in Chromes own task manager to see if you can find a tab using excessive ram?

Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser

See if indeed closing the video tab actually deletes the listing from the task manager perhaps?

A Guy

Thanks. I did just check that and I did find a few memory hogs there (facebook tabs) and when closed they did free up some memory again. I'm down to using 11GB right now, but am still lagging overall. Not even close to being CPU or I/O bound. If I restart chrome now it will get better, but won't return to really low memory use until I reboot.

Thanks,

Jamie