Solved Where did my memory go?

[murphyrg]

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]

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]

Post a screenshot of Windows Task manager - Performance tab.

 

[murphyrg]

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]

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

 

[cluberti]

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]

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]

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]

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

 

[murphyrg]

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,

 

[LMiller7]

The reason I suggested a driver as being the cause is that applications can't directly use paged or non paged kernel memory. There really isn't much left other than a driver or malware.

 

[cluberti]

And I follow that poolmon might allow me to ID the tag(s) that are related to my issue...

Correct.

Does this behavior seem like a driver memory leak, and is there a simpler way for the clueless to ID the offending driver?

Even if it isn't a leak, there's no good reason for a driver to need large amounts of nonpaged pool memory. If that is something a driver is doing on purpose, you want to get rid of it just as much as you'd want to get rid of it if it wasn't doing it intentionally. So, ultimately, it doesn't matter if the behavior is intentional or not - it's bad behavior, and likely a waste of memory.

I'd love there to be an easier way than this, but to be fair, driver behavior like this is pretty rare, so there's likely not a huge amount of reason to spend developer time to make this easier when there are existing tools that can be used in the rare case. I'd love it to be easy, but ... it's not. Thus is life.

 

[murphyrg]

I understand about this issue not being common enough to deserve a canned solution. I just need to whine a bit.

Another issue that has occurred in the last couple of days: When typing in programs like Gmail or iCloud accessed through Internet Explorer, the cursor will occasionally jump to a different spot as I type. Any chance this is related to my memory problem?

Thanks