85% ram usage at idle

xghoststrike

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I dont know if this is bad or not but at idle, my pc says it's using about 75-85% of my ram, and at games it doesn't really change, sometimes goes lower. I have 16gb or G.Skill Ripjaws 1600mhz (standard) ram. i recently updated to windows 10 and thats when i noticed this issue. It may have been present during windows 7 (previous version) but i didn't notice it. When I goto my resource monitor to check what is hogging all the memory there isn't anything that is solely using x amount of ram, the thing using the most is my vsserv.exe and then system, and those aren't even half a gb.

Also i have a program that shows me how much swap i am using or is being used. i have no idea what swap is or what it means but it shows up under ram section so i though i would throw it in, it says 45%

why is my ram usage so high for no reason? is this bad? i spent an hour or so trying to google it and what i read was i guess windows 10 stores stuff on ram so it will load and work faster but reset once the pc is turned off. Is this true? if so, would this high usage of ram slow my pc down any? i've seen it go to around 95% before.

Someone please help!
 
Solution
Sorry about the delay in replying,



Essentially, and this is how it was explained to me some time ago, the paged pool is the section of RAM that's available as and when. When you load up task manager or resource monitor or anything like that, the running processes and threads, they use this pool.

Drivers and key system processes use the non-paged pool. The main difference between the two is that the paged pool can go down, as things stop using it - the non-paged pool doesn't. It gets reserved and stays reserved, so that something important won't suddenly find itself without an allocated space.

From the looks of it, you have a memory leak. A driver or something similar is drawing...

DrDanPhD

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Swap is a designated section of the storage drive - HDD/SSD - that Windows will use if the RAM ever becomes full. In the old days, that was how we'd know if we had enough RAM or not.

As you can imagine, the swap file is much, much slower than RAM and will cause things to grind to a halt, relatively speaking.

Have you noticed any slowdown at all? Either in general use/boot or gaming?

If you could grab a shot from resource monitor it would be handy. If you're unsure how to get there, you can go about it like this -

Ctrl - alt - del
Task Manager
Performance tab
Resource Monitor
Memory Tab.

There should be moving graphs to the right, a process list at the top, and a segmented bar along the bottom. If you post up a screen grab that should show where/how the memory is being used.
 

xghoststrike

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I have SSD for boot/main drive. SSHD seagate hybrid for game drive, and HDD for videos. my computer used to be a lightning bolt but now it takes just a little longer to boot. and when it does not all my programs are ready, a few seconds after putting my password in my computer screen flash black for a few seconds and do like a super fast reboot and then at this point my programs load up. and i have noticed some programs being unreasonably slow. One more thing to add the high ram usage is only sometimes, its not all day everyday.

I have 3 monitors so i had to do a little editing to the picture so sorry if the picture is bad quality, best i could do let me know if I need to re-upload. Also I have windows 10 with rainmeter and gadgets, that's what is on my right monitor. the resource monitor is on the left.

And if i understood right, swap is where your pc uses your hard drive instead of your ram for certain applications? sorry still very confusing to me, even when i googled it.....

http://i60.tinypic.com/xm91fq.jpg link to picture, couldnt get the picture to just be here
 

DrDanPhD

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Essentially, yes - though only when it absolutely has to. The RAM should always take priority, only when there isn't enough space for what the application needs should Windows offload the data onto the page file.

For all intents and purposes though, you are correct - a section of the hard drive used as RAM for certain programs.



And that picture's fine, thank you.

Okay, that's definitely excessive. I can see your using Chrome, which has always been a memory hog, but eating up the better part of 16gb is another story. Is this from a fresh boot, or has the computer been in use at all?

Also looks like you're running Bitdefender (vsserv.exe); I've never used it myself but I have heard that it runs a pre-boot scan that may explain your screen/reboot issue as well. Does it do that every time? If so, might be wise to switch off the Scan-at-Startup function and give it a little test.

That brings us back to the RAM though. It's using a lot, but that's expected from an AV program and I've seen McAffee use a lot more when idling about. Again, it's not a massively bloated application running.

To confirm, you didn't notice anything like this prior to Windows 10? None of us can remember the exact numbers, no need to worry about that, but did the computer feel any faster?
 

xghoststrike

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I've never gone over 8 gbs in my life of being a pc user. Before i upgraded to windows 10, I never remember seeing using more than 30% and that was in gta5 putting my pc through hell! I've always used chrome and recently got bitdefender about 150 days ago. but during this whole time iv never seen this about of ram usage, bitdefender does use a lot compared to everything else. this is not fresh boot, this is the entire time my pc is one, currently im at 99% usage (it just slowly gets higher and higher). no matter idle or gaming, heavy use or fresh boot, its minimum is 80% and swap is always at 40% (currently 51%)

The bitdefender in anyway has never been a detriment to my pc, it never slows my pc down or hogged my ram before. I'm am 100% positive this all started from windows update from windows 7. it has to be something in the software of the new update.

as of right now i haven't noticed any significant boost in speed of anything. it feels just as fast as it was when it was windows 7. what baffles me is why cant i see in the resource center anything that takes up the 16gb's?! even ALL the other things added up doesn't add up to 16gb, maybe 5gb?! this is getting really irritating i haven't noticed anything faster but i have noticed things be much slower!

and i dont understand why their is swap if i have 16gb? mabey if i had like 4 and was doing crazy stuff but im at idle!
 

DrDanPhD

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I'd agree, when there has been no problem with a program it is unlikely to be the culprit. Especially when they have not changed.

Okay, let's try a different route. From the task manager/performance tab - under memory - what's the reading on the non-paged pool and paged pool?

It should be the bottom two readings, measured in mb.
 

xghoststrike

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Okay so today my pc hasn't been acting up and i can idle at 25% ram and 13% swap. i will post again if i have a spike in usage. sine my system calmed down, is it bad that i am using 25 ram and 13 swap? i should being using any swap correct?
 

DrDanPhD

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There will always be some swap file usage, the only way to truly eliminate it would be to reduce the size manually which I would strongly advise against. When the RAM is full without a reason, and the swap file is building up, that's when there's a problem.

If it does happen again, please let us know and, if you remember, include the last information I asked for. I'm hoping that could be the key just in case.

Otherwise, touch wood everything will carry on as normal.
 

xghoststrike

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Okay, so me having no idea whats going on and just my looking at my ram/swap usage everyday, every hour or so, what it seems like to me is, when i open and use a program, run and application, play a game, x amount of ram is used per situation and when im done with such thing, the ram stays "used". my guess is its being preallocated as if its waiting for such item to reload so it will be ready. reason i think so is cause when i restart m,y pc, my ram and swap go to below 10%. but this is where i think i am wrong, because sometimes when i restart, the ram may or may not reset and sometimes go higher to 85%.

but i check the paged pool like you said and is says right now paged pool 266mb and non-paged pool at 6.0gb
and this is at 56% ram (of 16gb) and 29% swap

what is paged/non-paged pool if i might ask?
 

DrDanPhD

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Sorry about the delay in replying,



Essentially, and this is how it was explained to me some time ago, the paged pool is the section of RAM that's available as and when. When you load up task manager or resource monitor or anything like that, the running processes and threads, they use this pool.

Drivers and key system processes use the non-paged pool. The main difference between the two is that the paged pool can go down, as things stop using it - the non-paged pool doesn't. It gets reserved and stays reserved, so that something important won't suddenly find itself without an allocated space.

From the looks of it, you have a memory leak. A driver or something similar is drawing large amounts of RAM and reserving it, meaning that with every increment what you have available is technically lower.

This would also explain why on some restarts this happens - if the driver kicks in immediately, then it will start to draw that RAM straight away.

The hard part, technically speaking, is identifying the driver in question that's causing this. It could be an old USB device plugged in a year ago, it could be the graphics driver, it could be the keyboard or mluse - there is a handy guide for identifying whether this is the case here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2009/03/26/3211216.aspx

It should be fully compatible with Windows 10, so long as you make use of the WDK driver kit.

To be completely honest, though, you could spend a whole day following those instructions to the letter and only succeed in identifying the driver; I'd never recommend deleting it straight from explorer so unless there's an updated version you'd need to use some form of uninstaller to make sure it's completely gone.

If I were in this position, I would consider a full re-installation of Windows, fresh to 10 - naturally, though, this can also be more trouble than it's worth.

Before making any decision though, have you tried booting into safe mode? Give that a go, and see if the leak is still present. Only core drivers are loaded, so that should at least narrow it down to non-Windows as the culprit.

Or put us back to square one, unfortunately.

Booting to Safe Mode:

http://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/2304-safe-mode-start-windows-10-a.html
 
Solution

xghoststrike

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Feb 19, 2015
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well [CENSORED]. thats the worst thing to hear.... thank you for your time, ill give this a week or so to try and the asshole, ill try to keep posted
 

Virtia

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Without additional hardware details it's difficult to track down a specific cause. That said, I experienced an identical issue immediately after an upgrade to Windows 10. Specifically, mine had no individual program attributable to the increased memory usage, and my "Non-Paged Pool" size was >14GB (out of 16GB available RAM) and commensurately high swap usage. This is, as was mentioned, a clear memory leak issue.


In my case, it was the Network Data Usage service causing issues in combination with my motherboard's Killer e2200 NIC. I've heard of this issue off and on since Windows 8, with a bunch of assorted NICs. Disabling the service solved the issue on reboot, and it's been fine since.

To disable, change:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu
to Startup type 4 (disabled)
 

K_6

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Feb 7, 2017
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My memory is also maxed out, I uploaded a picture of my resource manager too.
How do I fix this problem??
http://imgur.com/a/ZKu8l
 

Kayu80

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Mar 11, 2017
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Thank you for the information... I find out that my XBox controller was the source of the problem!

Last night I plugged the controller to play a game and then restart my PC after gaming time to refresh the resources for the MineCraft server I'm hosting at home.

This morning it was impossible to run anything the RAM was 84% usage and any single software i was running was trowing the RAM at 99%... Reading your answer, I had that feeling looking at my XBox Controller the IT WAS THE PROBLEM. So I've restart... and was at 82% RAM usage then I unplugged the controller then restart and VOILÀ ! Now smoothly running under 30% (while running the server - 18% if not)

Thank You again !