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Now I don't want to label it "memory leak" per se, because usually in topics with that name it all comes down to old drivers and non-paged pool. And I think I've already passed that point by following most of those advices.

My situation is a bit different. Something is using a lot of memory and it isn't clearly shown in task manager. After a reboot the situation becomes better, then with time gradually the system takes up more and more RAM, even though nothing is really running, and no one is really doing anything with the computer.

Today is a good example: my wife left to work after me and forgot to shut down the PC. No biggie, of course. But when I come home, I see that half my memory is already gone, and that's approximately 7.3 GBs of RAM. I mean, where did it go, who or what used it all up?

It looks like this:

Task Manager screenshot

Performance Tab Screenshot

It all just doesn't add up to such high usage. I am definitely missing something here. When I was using Windows 8.1 this would never go up like this. I mean I had 8 GBs then, not even 16.

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  • Have a look in the resource monitor, on the memory tab. It will give you more verbose data about what memory is used, such as shared memory. To get here click the "Open resource Monitor" in the performance tab of task manager.
    – mt025
    Aug 8, 2016 at 17:44
  • I actually wanted to post that screen as well, I just did't have enough rep. The situation there is pretty similar. It doesn't add up to such huge amounts. i.stack.imgur.com/a0zSH.png
    – dharlequin
    Aug 8, 2016 at 17:48
  • Look at Sysinternals Suite, it's a Microsoft set of apps. ProcExp is Process Explorer and give a lot more detail about running processes. Perhaps this will help you find the program hogging your RAM
    – Cand3r
    Aug 8, 2016 at 17:50
  • Order by 'shareable' col. This exact thing happens to me, and its the shareable amount that is always high.
    – mt025
    Aug 8, 2016 at 17:51
  • 2
    Right, Mapped Files it is. Please change to the “File Summary” tab and order by “Active”. /edit: Oh yeah, and provide a screenshot of course. :)
    – Daniel B
    Aug 8, 2016 at 17:59

1 Answer 1

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It would appear µTorrent (also available as “BitTorrent”) uses memory mapped files to access on-disk data. It’s generally a highly efficient method.

Judging from various reports, µTorrent has a rather liberal policy on how long to keep file parts in-memory. There is an advanced switch, diskio.flush_files, that is supposed to make µTorrent close and reopen all file handles every minute. However, in several threads from 2015, users reported this switch has no effect.

µTorrent might have some settings that control memory usage.

Because memory usage doesn’t seem at critical levels on your system, you can just keep using your PC as is. If you ever do run into performance issues, it might be time to switch to another BitTorrent client that is more resource-friendly.

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