Why does my computer use so much physical memory?

[Aqian1]

It hovers around 60% when doing nothing and when I check to what is causing it it seems to be something called svchost.exe, however I discovered that when I put my system to sleep and then turn it back on the physical memory seems to lower alot and svchost.exe stays at a constant low usage of memory. Why does this happen? Is there any way I can lower the physical memory usage of svchost.exe without putting my system to sleep everytime?

 

[kanewolf]

It could be anti-virus or some other background task taking advantage of the idle resources. It could be Windows update, especially Windows 10 since it does a lot of things in the background with update.

 

[johnbl]

svchost.exe is a wrapper for a bunch of services that are running on your system. This means that many, many system services are running under this one process. You can use task manager to look to see what is actually running. using 60% of your available memory could be a normal state of windows. It all depends on the memory used by each process under the service host.

Now that being said, any of the processes running can consume lots of memory when it hits a error condition.
for example, I have seen background file transfers take lots of memory, search indexes database using up all of the free memory when the database gets corrupted, broken windows updates the list gets long and the fix depends on which subprocess is using the extra memory.

you can try some generic fixes like:
start cmd.exe as an admin then run
sfc.exe /scannow
(this will windows files using a local backup copy, (often malware modifies the backup copy so it might not help))

dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
(this will repair your windows files, using a trusted source from the Microsoft update servers)

other common causes of this problem would not be fixed with the above commands.

for example, to fix the windows search indexer you would have to delete its database and recreate it.
to fix the windows update problems you would have to run the Microsoft windows update troubleshooter
or locate the actual download directory and delete it.
Other fixes just depend on the cause of the problem, bad spots on the hard drive might just require your system sleep to be turned off until the windows data integrity checking has a chance to complete. it start to run 5 minutes after the system goes idle. I would turn off the sleep functions and leave the system idle over night. The process attempts to scan your entire drive and find any cluster that has read errors, it then tries to read it over and over until it gets a good copy. At that point it moves the data to a new cluster and marks the old one as bad. The process can take days.

Microsoft has tools herer: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021.aspx
the tool process explorer should be able to help to find out which subprocess is using excessive memory and help isolate the actual problem

 

[Aqian1]

It could be anti-virus or some other background task taking advantage of the idle resources. It could be Windows update, especially Windows 10 since it does a lot of things in the background with update.

Thanks! but is there any answer to why svchost.exe suddenly stops using alot of memory after I put my computer to sleep then turn it back on?

 

[Aqian1]

svchost.exe is a wrapper for a bunch of services that are running on your system. This means that many, many system services are running under this one process. You can use task manager to look to see what is actually running. using 60% of your available memory could be a normal state of windows. It all depends on the memory used by each process under the service host.

Now that being said, any of the processes running can consume lots of memory when it hits a error condition.
for example, I have seen background file transfers take lots of memory, search indexes database using up all of the free memory when the database gets corrupted, broken windows updates the list gets long and the fix depends on which subprocess is using the extra memory.

you can try some generic fixes like:
start cmd.exe as an admin then run
sfc.exe /scannow
(this will windows files using a local backup copy, (often malware modifies the backup copy so it might not help))

dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
(this will repair your windows files, using a trusted source from the Microsoft update servers)

other common causes of this problem would not be fixed with the above commands.

for example, to fix the windows search indexer you would have to delete its database and recreate it.
to fix the windows update problems you would have to run the Microsoft windows update troubleshooter
or locate the actual download directory and delete it.
Other fixes just depend on the cause of the problem, bad spots on the hard drive might just require your system sleep to be turned off until the windows data integrity checking has a chance to complete. it start to run 5 minutes after the system goes idle. I would turn off the sleep functions and leave the system idle over night. The process attempts to scan your entire drive and find any cluster that has read errors, it then tries to read it over and over until it gets a good copy. At that point it moves the data to a new cluster and marks the old one as bad. The process can take days.

Microsoft has tools herer: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021.aspx
the tool process explorer should be able to help to find out which subprocess is using excessive memory and help isolate the actual problem

Would you be able to tell me why after I put my computer to sleep the svchost.exe task seems to dissapear? I checked the tasks it was running today which included windows update and some other features and then put my computer to sleep and then turned it back on to see if the tasks running were the same and found out it ran completely different tasks than before putting it to sleep so I infered that this was another one of the smaller versions of svchost.exe. This one is only around 80,000k large and the one before was around 1 million over.

 

[johnbl]

service host is a shell around another executable, the second executable can respond to various system events like a sleep and it might exit then restart sometime later after the system wakes. When a process exits all of its used memory space should be returned back to the system. You can use the Microsoft system internals tools (process explorer) to look at what exe are being run from the service host. If you suspect one service as being a problem you can unroll it so it is no longer grouped up with other services. It allows you to figure out which service might be consuming too much memory. When you know the name of the .exe you can google to see what it does and look for a update or remove it or fix the error condition that is causing a problem. Generally these are going to be 3rd party (non Microsoft programs) assuming you are doing your windows updates.

svchost.exe is a wrapper for a bunch of services that are running on your system. This means that many, many system services are running under this one process. You can use task manager to look to see what is actually running. using 60% of your available memory could be a normal state of windows. It all depends on the memory used by each process under the service host.

Now that being said, any of the processes running can consume lots of memory when it hits a error condition.
for example, I have seen background file transfers take lots of memory, search indexes database using up all of the free memory when the database gets corrupted, broken windows updates the list gets long and the fix depends on which subprocess is using the extra memory.

you can try some generic fixes like:
start cmd.exe as an admin then run
sfc.exe /scannow
(this will windows files using a local backup copy, (often malware modifies the backup copy so it might not help))

dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
(this will repair your windows files, using a trusted source from the Microsoft update servers)

other common causes of this problem would not be fixed with the above commands.

for example, to fix the windows search indexer you would have to delete its database and recreate it.
to fix the windows update problems you would have to run the Microsoft windows update troubleshooter
or locate the actual download directory and delete it.
Other fixes just depend on the cause of the problem, bad spots on the hard drive might just require your system sleep to be turned off until the windows data integrity checking has a chance to complete. it start to run 5 minutes after the system goes idle. I would turn off the sleep functions and leave the system idle over night. The process attempts to scan your entire drive and find any cluster that has read errors, it then tries to read it over and over until it gets a good copy. At that point it moves the data to a new cluster and marks the old one as bad. The process can take days.

Microsoft has tools herer: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545021.aspx
the tool process explorer should be able to help to find out which subprocess is using excessive memory and help isolate the actual problem

Would you be able to tell me why after I put my computer to sleep the svchost.exe task seems to dissapear? I checked the tasks it was running today which included windows update and some other features and then put my computer to sleep and then turned it back on to see if the tasks running were the same and found out it ran completely different tasks than before putting it to sleep so I infered that this was another one of the smaller versions of svchost.exe. This one is only around 80,000k large and the one before was around 1 million over.

 

[Colif]

you should download process explorer as suggested, it will let you see whats running attached to svhost

the default view is tree structure meaning like your task manager screen, it will show what processes are under svhost, but unlike task manager, it shows the ram usage of each part so you can see what is eating your ram

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

This page shows what all the colours and headings mean, link at bottom of it shows how to use it to find problems. You can right click headers and run an av scan from within the program.