Low Memory Error After Fresh Install

Flame Soulis

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May 11, 2013
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During the Windows 10 force install times, I actually disabled Windows Updater to the best of my ability since I leave my system on all the time. After the whole thing died down, suddenly my system complained about having low memory. I figured "Okay, happened once, no big deal."

The problem is this didn't happen just once. It'd happen almost all the time after my system experienced a hard crash (power loss, plain old crash, etc). However it went away was seemingly if I just ignored it long enough. After one particular night kept crashing me while running Chrome (with only a few extensions), I went out and tried to find the culprit. After keeping an eye on Resource Monitor (not Task Manager), I saw something that made my head spin: I was running into the issue with many times having more than 6GB/16GB as free memory!

Tired of the guess work, I took the old fashioned route of just reinstalling Windows (I wanted a fresh start anyway). Reinstalled Windows 7 64bit Pro, got my drivers back and running, and all was well. That is, until today, while running AltSpaceVR, I experienced the Low Memory Error. I was back to where I left off. This also happened while running the Epic Games Launcher to download the Ark ADK while at work.

When I did a system backup, I ran the FreeMem test that came with CloneZilla to see if maybe I was having a hardware issue. Test ran 3 times and all was well. I know you are supposed to run it MANY times (like 30+), but I was impatient and needed sleep for work. I even reseated my RAM to be safe (never know) and ensured I had all my latest drivers.

So now I'm at a total loss. I thought by reinstalling Windows, whatever was causing the issue, assuming it was just some weird bug caused by disabling updates, would go away. Seeing that it is still here, I now can at least tell it has something to do with my setup or my system. I plan to rebuild my current system soon, but I'm growing annoyed with the situation at hand.

I'm at a full loss at what is causing this issue! If it's some kind of software conflict or hardware conflict, I want to resolve it before doing a new build, let alone another reinstall!

So, here is what I have installed (and was present in my previous install unless otherwise noted):

  • ■ Avast
    ■ Chrome
    ■ Steam
    ■ Oculus Runtime Latest (as of posting, I have no clue where to find that version number)
    ■ Oculus Runtime 0.8.0.0 (so I can still access older Oculus titles)
    ■ AltSpaceVR (the program that crashed
    ■ Epic Games Launcher (new to this install, was not present previously)
    ■ Motion Creator 2 (for my Razer Hydra)
    ■ Skype (though I mostly keep it off since I know it tends to leak memory badly)
    ■ TeamViewer
    ■ Dropbox
    ■ Malware Bytes (I was concerned about some possible virus)
    ■ K-Lite Codec
    ■ 7-Zip

As for my system specs:
CPU: Intel i5-3570K (Not overclocked at the moment for testing purposes)
RAM: 4x4GB DDR3 (16GB)
GPU: MSI GTX980Ti Lightning Edition
Mother Board: Gigabyte Z77-DS3H (F9 Firmware)
OS: Windows 7 Pro 64bit
Hard Drives:

  • ■ Samsung SSD 128GB (mSATA)
    ■ 2x3TB Seagate Drives in Software RAID 0 (courtesy of Windows)
    ■ OCZ RevoDrive X2
Notable Devices:

  • ■ Razer Hydra
    ■ Oculus DK2
    ■ Behringer Xenyx 302USB
    ■ Two Monitors
    ■ Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver
    ■ Logitech G710+ Keyboard
    ■ Logitech G300 Mouse
 

Flame Soulis

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May 11, 2013
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And just as I was typing my response after having a run in with the error, chrome, the only active program, caused my system to go unstable and required a reboot (all hail SSDs).

Anyhow, I just had it happen again while running else Heart.Break() (looked fun and it's okay). I'll do my best to snapshot the screen (dual monitors) the next time it happens, but this time I had 12900+MB of Free memory!

I did forget to mention it, but I also have DisplayFusion... but I had that way before this mess started happening.

As for my page file settings, at the moment, I'm on default (system managed), where it is using my SSD (not the best choice, but whatever makes it happy). As for the previous, I had a 30GB page file on my RAID 0 set up, since I thought it was due to massive memory leaking and figured I'd give it a lot to see if it'd delay it at all (which it didn't).

I'll start playing it again and see if I can't get it to happen.
 

Flame Soulis

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May 11, 2013
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And, about an hour and a half in, Low Memory! Snapshot was taken the MOMENT I heard the error sound.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xfip2a16t8kfyrr/Screenshot%202016-09-30%2010.49.24.png?dl=0

Also, the currently allocated page file setting is at 16345 MB, according to the Virtual Memory settings, and this is on my main OS SSD which doesn't/shouldn't need any initialization (unlike perhaps the RAID drive, but I'm not sure if that'd effect anything).

While I wait for an answer, while I am at work, I will remove all but 1 RAM stick and have it run FreeMemx86 for 12 hours. That should be enough to check if at least that stick is good. It'll take 3 more attempts, but at the very least I can eliminate hardware being an issue.

EDIT: It's worth pointing out I have about 30 seconds to close the program, otherwise the program that caused the Low Memory will, itself, complain about low memory! It's very strange... and it does seem to effect other running programs (namely Chrome, which will cause the system to freeze if I attempt to go past the Google homepage).
 

Flame Soulis

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And after 23 passes, my first stick of 4GB DDR3 ram checks out. I decided to boot Windows and... it seems all fine. I've been running Chrome, playing a few less intensive games (again, less memory at the moment) and I haven't seen the error just yet. I'll be testing another stick tonight and maybe something just happened to one of the sticks of RAM. Trick now is to find out which one.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
low memory error isn't ram, its virtual memory so it could be a a memory leak of a driver not releasing the ram its asked for after it crashes and page file slowly filling up. You can run out of memory with only 3gb of ram being used

I helped someone recently with something like this and he had an Occulus too, check you have latest drivers. Check all your hardware and make sure its up to date
 

Flame Soulis

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Hmm... I wonder if that has to do with a conflict when running different runtime versions. I will have to uninstall the older ones and see how that goes. I know I have the latest drivers for most components since I had to download them again. Other stuff would be oddball monitor stuff.
I just find it odd that my system with 4GB is running more stable than with 16GB,with the only changes being in RAM.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
I assume you didn't change your page file settings, as the only memory error win 10 produces is talking about virtual memory which includes page file.

I can't see why the system would reject 16gb of ram that was working perfectly fine before the install, you shouldn't have to change anything in bios to get it to work. If this were win 10, I have seen it reject ram before but this is win 7.

I would download this and use it instead of task manager to find the memory leak, as I think the problem is software still. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396 - helps to run it as admin
this explains what columns and colours mean: http://www.howtogeek.com/school/sysinternals-pro/lesson2/
 

Flame Soulis

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This is strange...

So my second stick checked out, and so I added back the other stick to have 8GB. Now, instead of getting the error... the symptoms it produces are suddenly happening. Programs complaining about being unable to access memory, and a new one: the background when shutting down is completely black (with the Windows 7 glow text at the bottom still present).

I remember using this program before, but I never tried using it to identify memory leaks. What confuses me though is that the low memory stuff happened shortly after my PC lost power suddenly. I figured it'd fix itself up afterwards but it never really did. This entire time since the fresh reinstall, I never ran into that power problem, but with the issues coming back, I'm not sure where the problem even is now.

I'll keep process explorer in the background to keep an eye on things, but now I am not even getting the pop up for low memory, so knowing when it happened just got harder.
 

Flame Soulis

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So I went ahead and removed my Oculus and disabled the run time libraries (1.3.x and 0.8). So far, no problems, even after pushing BOTH page file and physical memory to their limits (Epic Games Launcher is great for that). I'll go ahead and slowly add back the devices as well as reintroduce the runtimes to see if the problems start reoccuring. If this is the case, that's a MAJOR issue to me since that means I can't use the rift! Hopefully this is only related to running both at the same time due to start up.
 

Flame Soulis

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I think that might be spot on, along with the fact I think the two runtimes on my system (0.8 and 1.8) were conflicting, as Windows set them both the start up. There was a runtime switcher program I grabbed and every time I start my system, I just run it to stop the process I don't need. This seems to halt the memory leaking process altogether. Since it'd restart the services, that might be following with what you found.

Many thanks for the help!