Question Very high RAM usage when idle, nothing open, lagging games/lagging PC in general ?

[jmg11]

I've been trying to search for solution or reasons for this but cannot find anything.

My ram when I restart sits at like 4-5GB or so out of the 32GB I have which is perfectly fine. After a while (I haven't watched it constantly to tell exactly how long) it'll be using 20-30GB with almost nothing running (maybe a few chrome tabs and discord).

The main issue is with my searching: Every answer says something akin to "Oh that's normal windows behavior; if it's not causing performance issues then you're fine, stop worrying." Except in my case it IS causing performance issues. If I try to start a game up when its like this it'll go up to like 31.5GB used, and at that point my whole system starts to massively slow down, let alone causing huge lag for said game.

I've tried all kinds of programs to see what might be using it and I cannot for the life of me figure it out.

I already have superfetch turned off so it shouldn't be that.

Here's some screenshots from task manager and others (yes, I know I have a number of chrome tabs open (5-10 at varying times). That does not use up 22GB. And even if it did, I'd like to think it'd show it in ONE of these screenshots)

Task manager:

RamMap & Process Explorer:

 

[SkyNetRising]

What are specs of your system?

Close Chrome,
close Discord,
close rammap64,
uninstall phone link.

What is ram usage, after you do that?

BTW - you're uploading something to internet at 7.2Mbps.
Nvidia share? May be try closing that too.

 

[jmg11]

Ryzen 7600x
ASRock 650m pro rs wifi
2x 16GB 6000mhz DDR5
RTX 2060

Closed all those, went down to 17.5GB in use

https://imgur.com/mUOL4Hv

View: https://i.imgur.com/mUOL4Hv.png

https://imgur.com/WXF3DOJ

View: https://i.imgur.com/WXF3DOJ.png

https://imgur.com/dv6iQRy

View: https://i.imgur.com/dv6iQRy.png


I don't have anything uploading, that 7.2mbps is receive and its from having a discord video stream open, but I appreciate the note on that!

 

[Ralston18]

Look in Task Scheduler.

Anything unexpected or unknown being triggered?

 

[Colif]

in process explorer, click on the graphs at top and look on the memory tab and share a screenshot


are you running process explorer as admin as then it shows more

does usage drop on a restart? does it slowly grow through out day?

 

[jmg11]

in process explorer, click on the graphs at top and look on the memory tab and share a screenshot


are you running process explorer as admin as then it shows more

does usage drop on a restart? does it slowly grow through out day?

Sorry for the late reply, life kept me away from PC.

This is with it run as administrator. Usage does drop down to expected levels (a few gigs for windows and maybe discord, etc.). I'm not sure if it grows slowly or after opening a game or something. I'll keep an eye on it and it'll be normal, then open a game like Elden Ring or FFXIV or something and of course it goes up during, then at some point I notice hey I haven't been playing any games for a while and it's still at ~22+ GB.

However if I open a game and close it once the ram spikes up it'll drop back down to normal so seems to only happen after a while? Not sure but can do some more testing.

 

[Colif]

so its not a driver memory leak then as they only really drop usage after a restart of windows.
And your driver WS is tiny compared to mine (which does make me wonder about mine)

Need to figure out what game it might be that is to blame. Something is holding onto ram and not releasing it.

rammap uses ram itself to map the ram.. so you need to take that into account.
looking on the File Summary tab and clicking Total column header might show something too. You need to compare what it looks like at boot with nothing running to what its pages show when you using 22gb, to really see what cause is. - maybe take screenshots to compare for self.
this tab shows everything running, including drivers.

In process explorer, right click the title row and choose select columns
Choose Process Memory
Tick Peak Working Set Size and click OK (might not help but might offer a clue)
it will add it to end of front page, can drag it to left if you want.
Can also add Peak Private Bytes as well in same menu

Private bytes = Ram + page file usage
Working set = actual ram usage

How many chrome tabs you got open in that shot? How many is normal?
discord seems a little high but none of them alone add up to 22gb.

I would run defender and maybe malwarebytes just to make sure its not an infection.

 

[hotaru.hino]

The thing that stood out to me the most was in the RAMMap image. "Unused" for some reason has a lot in the "Active" column. Maybe it might make sense to think this is really a negative, like how "System Idle Process" using a lot of CPU % just means the system is idling a lot. But it's added to the RAM usage if you add up the rest of the values.

According to Microsoft's documentation, the "Active" column means this:

Active: Pages of physical ram in active use by the specified category (usually a process working set or the system working set).

So something isn't allowing the OS to free up memory as it should. As for what to do specifically, I would need more time to dig in, but the 5 minute Google search led me to a Reddit post where at least on their computer, they resolved their problem by running the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool.

 

[Colif]

they resolved their problem by running the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool.

worth a try, tool has to be useful for something.

The Process private is similar to my amount,

he has way more Page table than I do - I have 172k, he has 2.8 million

Open the "Processes" tab in RamMap and sort by name. Look for a suspiciously high number of the same process. On my machine, "SynTPEnh.exe" was the culprit (a part of the touchpad driver). After a week of uptime, it amassed tens of thousands of entries in the page table, each 32kb in size.


My page table size was 1 GB, after a reboot, it's only 50 MB.

https://superuser.com/questions/782855/why-does-my-page-table-take-up-so-much-memory

 

[jmg11]

rammap uses ram itself to map the ram.. so you need to take that into account.
looking on the File Summary tab and clicking Total column header might show something too. You need to compare what it looks like at boot with nothing running to what its pages show when you using 22gb, to really see what cause is. - maybe take screenshots to compare for self.
this tab shows everything running, including drivers.

In process explorer, right click the title row and choose select columns
Choose Process Memory
Tick Peak Working Set Size and click OK (might not help but might offer a clue)
it will add it to end of front page, can drag it to left if you want.
Can also add Peak Private Bytes as well in same menu


How many chrome tabs you got open in that shot? How many is normal?
discord seems a little high but none of them alone add up to 22gb.

I would run defender and maybe malwarebytes just to make sure its not an infection.

File summary before (about 28GB used with no games, ~12 chrome tabs, discord open but not in a channel/stream/etc) and after a restart (reopened same chrome tabs and discord, ~7.1GB used)

Process explorer with same before and after as above

worth a try, tool has to be useful for something.

The Process private is similar to my amount,

he has way more Page table than I do - I have 172k, he has 2.8 million


https://superuser.com/questions/782855/why-does-my-page-table-take-up-so-much-memory

Memory Diagnostic found nothing unfortunately.

Did that link, most processes seem to have between like 5-30 copies (usually towards the lower end), however there is a couple hundred copies of tasklist.exe and conhost.exe. Not sure if that's not/expected or an indicator of anything though, googling hasn't come up with anything indicating as such.


Will do windows defender and Malwarebytes scans when I am able to.

 

[Colif]

Tasklist.exe
Looking at my PC at idle, it shows no instances of tasklist.exe

Tasklist.exe is a command-line tool provided by Microsoft Windows that allows users to view a list of currently running processes on their computer.

By running tasklist.exe, users can see information about each process, such as the process ID, memory usage, and CPU usage. This can be helpful for identifying any misbehaving or resource-intensive processes that may be slowing down the system.

It is ironic you have to use it to kill the process

Type tasklist to see all running processes with their PIDs and memory usage. To end a task, use taskkill /IM “NAME” /F, replacing NAME with the process name. The /F flag forces termination.

you type that in command prompt (admin)

Conhost = Command Prompt. Its more likely to have multiple windows open.

Now the question I have is were the many tasklist.exe using much ram combined. AS we been looking for 1 big amount when its probably a whole lot of small numbers

knowing what cause is really half the problem. Need to know what is starting it...

Now there is one way... I don't know how often tasklist.exe is used by windows normally but you can trace what uses it
below program can be used to monitor processes. Should be able to set something up for tasklist.exe and see what it returns.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon

its possible it was the conhosts... BUT its used so much that monitoring it likely slow PC down too much.

 

[jmg11]

I may have found at least a partial cause. When I went to check rammap again and see if I can find tasklist causing any issues I noticed, after closing wuthering waves, that it looks like so:

At the time of this screenshot I have 7 chrome tabs and discord (no call or video or anything) open and am at 16.5/32GB of ram. wuthering is using up about 8.8GB after only having it open for a couple hours. I'll have to run it for many hours and re-check and see if its up in the 20+ gb range but there might be some kind of memory issue going on with it that I somehow didn't notice before.

If that is the case/cause I apologize for everyone spending so much time helping me troubleshoot when it was a single game causing it the whole time and I somehow didn't notice/clue in to it.

 

[Colif]

If that is the case/cause I apologize for everyone spending so much time helping me troubleshoot when it was a single game causing it the whole time and I somehow didn't notice/clue in to it.

Not a waste of time, it could help others answer same questions.

Wuthering Waves has a memory leak

Game gets bigger the longer it runs, biggest it has been was 4gb. However it doesnt free up the ram space after closing the application so over a few days my RAM is now sitting at 70% load in idle. Restarting pc fixes it.

link
Plenty of posts from last two weeks about it.
looks like they need to patch it as your only choice is restart PC to get ram back.

I did think about looking that up yesterday, after turning light off and going to sleep, but didn't want to turn PC on again