Windows 8.1 N Professional - Extremely high physical memory usage with only one or two programs running

[Kormaz]

I have recently built a gaming PC and basically since I built it I have been having issues with the system running very slowly. I found that when this happens, the physical memory usage is 95% and above. Now, I don't put my PC under heavy load (mainly Dota 2 and Firefox open) and yet I constantly have this problem. See links below for images of Task Manager. What can I do to resolve this?

http://imgur.com/a/Mmsw2

http://imgur.com/ZY12g23

 

[Karsten75]

Post back an image from RAMMAP. Your pictures do not convince me you have a problem.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ff700229.aspx

 

[Kormaz]

Not sure exactly what you want to see but here is the main tab:

http://i.imgur.com/HQ8hwoU.png

 

[Karsten75]

OK, I don't see it, everything looks ... well, normal. Did you take the reading while your PC was under load/stress?

Do you experience high paging/swapping to the swapfile? your disk activity light will be almost constantly on if this is the case.

I'm struggling, I've lookd at my system for reference, and I just can't figure out what to tell you. Everyone has a long list of tasks/processes taking up storage and that's more or less normal. Your highest processes are in fact those you expect to be there.

The only thing I an even begin to think of - and I have no evidence for this either - is that you would do better if you upgraded to 16GB of RAM. But honestly, it's a guess.

Is there any other evidence of your problem? From any of the tabs in Task Manager, Resource Manager, or RAMMAP? A day or so ago we saw a guy with a memory leak in a driver - someone was quick to point that out. ..

 

[Kormaz]

The last reading was when the PC was fine.

I have to admit, my in-depth knowledge of computers isn't very strong so I can't answer your question about paging etc. It just seems to me that it's not right for the physical memory to be at such high usage when the total memory adds up to much much below the 8GB of RAM I have. It's affects my PC and makes it unusable and requires a restart to fix the problem.

 

[Kormaz]

Bump

 

[Karsten75]

Bump

[strike]Why don't you post a RAMMAP image from when you're having the problem. That may help someone to figure out what's going on.

I've given you a whole lot of other things to use to provide some information for me (or others) to help you figure it out. Without that information, I doubt anyone can help you.
[/strike]

Edit: Just looked at the OP and I see you added information to the screenshots - I'll just let you know that updating a post does not show up and few people will look back to try and figure out what was added - best to make a new link in a new post and *say* what you've added.

The screenshots you posted clearly shows that DOTA is chewing up a gigantic chunk of memory. Why, I don't know - I may do some research later if I have time.

Because of the DOTA use of your RAM (and virtual memory), you are out of memory and paging/swapping like mad.

If (and this is important to understand) - and only if - that memory use pattern for DOTA is normal, then upgrading your RAM would be a good improvement for your computer. If the memory usage pattern is as a result of a memory leak in DOTA, then upgrading RAM will merely push the problem out a little.

 

[Karsten75]

Here's a thread you might want to read and see if it applies to you.

http://dev.dota2.com/showthread.php?t=138320

 

[Kormaz]

I refer back to my question a couple of answers back - in the screenshot I posted, Dota is using 63MB of memory, correct? What I don't understand is how the physical memory usage can be at 96% when the program that is using the most is only using 63MB? As I said, I'm not very knowledgable about computer architecture but that doesn't seem right to me. Minimum system requirements for the game are 2GB, how would computers with less than 8GB of RAM run it when my memory usage is up at 7.8GB?

Thanks for the link, I'm at work at the moment but I will try some of the things when I get home. The only thing is that the people in that thread are running Nvidia cards, my GPU is a Radeon R9 280x.

 

[Karsten75]

I refer back to my question a couple of answers back - in the screenshot I posted, Dota is using 63MB of memory, correct? What I don't understand is how the physical memory usage can be at 96% when the program that is using the most is only using 63MB? As I said, I'm not very knowledgable about computer architecture but that doesn't seem right to me. Minimum system requirements for the game are 2GB, how would computers with less than 8GB of RAM run it when my memory usage is up at 7.8GB?

Thanks for the link, I'm at work at the moment but I will try some of the things when I get home. The only thing is that the people in that thread are running Nvidia cards, my GPU is a Radeon R9 280x.

As for where your memory goes - RAMMAP is a very good tool (better than Windows Task Manager/Resource Manager) to help figure that out.

Ideally, if you run RAMMAP, click on File - Save and save the output (Do this when your system is constrained) then upload that file to a sharing site. I (or anyone else running RAMMAP) can then open it and look at the various tabs to see if we can spot something.

Yea, I saw the bit about Nvidia cards, but I figured the chances were 75% you had one. Guess I was wrong. 🙁

And we still don't *know* for a fact that your system is suffering from a memory constraint.