At my wit's end...high memory but figures don't add up!!

Firstly let me apologise, i'm not the most technologically informed person. I bought a new Samaung Chronos 7 laptop a month ago and it has been running fine up until the last week or so when I noticed that it had been becoming increasingly sluggish from start-up onwards. A cursory Google on Monday led me to discover that there was a piece of software called Intellimemory pre-loaded which could account for this, and that I would be better off deleting that. Having done so I had a short period of relief but in the last two days memory use (or apparent memory use) has crept back up to the point that now, at any given point, the task manager will show 85%-90% typically. It flashes up low memory warnings every 5-10 minutes that are incredibly frustrating. The problem is that, with 8GB of memory, the figures of what the task manager is saying accounts for this just don't add up. I had included some (i hope relevant!) screenshots below...(also attached in case the resolution messes up!)



Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Do you ever get the problem when chrome is not running? I used to run chromium snapshots and often problems could be circumvented by running an older or newer snap shot. Also search out command line switches. I'm sure there is one that limits the number of chrome.exe instances. I forget the switch but it has "render" embedded in it.

I agree with MilesAhead; in that, you have a ton of Chrome instances running simultaneously. So, the first thing I would do is ditch Chrome and use an alternative browser to see if that has any impact on your memory usage. I also believe that you figures don't add up because you are displaying the wrong compliment of views, so just show us this one for starters:

That's the thing, even outside of Chrome it still runs like this.

Even when Chrome is active the numbers don't add up to the percentages that it's quoting. It's almost as if Windows is partitioning memory and saying it's in use?

Just show us the screenshot I requested!

I suggest using SysInternals RamMap. It's free and has a bar graph of memory usage similar to Windows Seven. If you can't find it on Microsoft site you can download from Softpedia.

The real problem is the very high commit charge of 31.7 GB. The high memory usage is simply a side effect. You need to go to the details tab and add the "commit size" column. Post a screenshot sorted by this column.

The memory usage numbers in the processes tab will rarely add up to anything useful. It was never intended that they would. These numbers are not the full memory usage of the processes and there are major users of memory that are not processes and not shown.

LMiller7 said:

The real problem is the very high commit charge of 31.7 GB. The high memory usage is simply a side effect. You need to go to the details tab and add the "commit size" column. Post a screenshot sorted by this column.

The memory usage numbers in the processes tab will rarely add up to anything useful. It was never intended that they would. These numbers are not the full memory usage of the processes and there are major users of memory that are not processes and not shown.

Click to expand...

Yes, I saw the 5.9GB cached and the view I requested was the first step in trying to decipher that allocation; however, the OP is sitting on this thread right now and watching the responses but I somehow sense he is being resistive about showing anything other than "what he thinks" are the right views. Good luck.

Hi, sorry for the delay in responding. I'm not trying to hide anything and am happy to show whatever anyone needs in order to get this problem solved!! It's just that I'm trying to do this whilst at work that I had to step away. I have included the details tab that you asked for, but i'm not sure how to include the 'commit size'?



Thanks again for all your help, it's very much appreciated!!!



PS as i posted that, i got what must be my 18th lo memory warning of the day. Just chrome (to post this), post-it notes and task manager open.

It's just occurred to me that wasn't what you were asking for at all!!


Hopefully that's more like it.

Ah!! That's what I was trying to get at with RamMap. I didn't see the link in TM to open the resource view. I'd go by the TM as RamMap seems to disagree afa free memory goes. Or I could be reading it incorrectly. TM shows over a GB free on my system while RamMap has it at less than a quarter gig. Strange.

The commit charge is 31.7 GB which is far higher than can be accounted for by visible processes. It is also not accounted for by either the paged or non-paged pools. My guess would be malware but others may have other ideas.

Thanks. I've run a full Norton360 and Malwarebytes and neither showed any issue. More annoyingly it's now started closing my browser at will (took three attempts just to post this on one tab in Firefox!!). Anything else I can try??

yuomi said:

Thanks. I've run a full Norton360 and Malwarebytes and neither showed any issue. More annoyingly it's now started closing my browser at will (took three attempts just to post this on one tab in Firefox!!). Anything else I can try??

Click to expand...

Perhaps in control panel in Administrative tools the memory diagnostic:



or one of the other tools.

Wow...thats a hell of a lot of modified RAM in use there , thats data waiting to be written to disk before it's memory space is freed up for re-use (if MY memory serves correctly).

David Bailey, thanks. I'll try now and report back!

Wullail, that's my understanding too. It just seems so far there's no way of finding out what modified it or what needs to happen before it can be freed up!

I would look with SysInternals tools. Hard to imagine 5+ GB needs to be written to disk unless you are processing video. Maybe there's some hidden data mining. Either that or WMP is indexing your media files.