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A few days ago I updated my PC to Windows 10. However, after some use my PC started to slow down until it was impossible to use – it was due to high memory usage. After a restart, everything came back to normal (total usage around 25% of 8GB of RAM). However, during a few hours of usage the memory builds up again to 70%, and if not restarted it further goes to 100%, and later on even freezes. Task manager does not help very much as it does not show all the processes (added screenshots below). Also tried RAMMap but it gives an error: "error refreshing database". I tried Googling this question, yet without much success.

I do not know much about PCs, but maybe some of you know this issue, or could help to find out what is using my RAM.

RAM usage 1

RAM usage 2

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  • @AR provide a xperf trace. I need to look at the call stacks to see more.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Aug 5, 2015 at 15:23
  • 3
    I know this thread is solved - but a good first step is to disable hyper-v. that was the culprit in my case.
    – hypermails
    Commented Feb 3, 2019 at 19:34
  • What was Hyper-V running?
    – rogerdpack
    Commented Jul 8, 2019 at 5:07
  • @hypermails hyper-v was my issue and using poolmon I still was unable to find the culprit. Disabled hyper-v and everything works fine again (cpu went from 60-90% to 30's). Downside is I cannot run docker at this time but at least my laptop is usable again for other daily activities.
    – IT_User
    Commented Jan 12, 2021 at 20:15
  • @hypermails Disabling Hyper-V solved my issue too, many thanks. This could be an answer.
    – Nail
    Commented May 7, 2021 at 9:52

4 Answers 4

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You have a memory leak caused by a driver. Look at the high value of nonpaged kernel memory. In your case this is over 3.7 GB. You can use poolmon to see which driver is causing the high usage.

Install the Windows WDK, run poolmon, sort it via P after pool type so that non paged is on top and via B after bytes to see the tag which uses most memory. Run poolmon by going to the folder where WDK is installed, go to Tools (or C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64) and click poolmon.exe.

Now see which pooltag uses most memory as shown here:

enter image description here

Now open a cmd prompt and run the findstr command. To do this, open cmd prompt and type cd C:\Windows\System32\drivers. Then type findstr /s __ *.*, where __ is the tag (left-most name in poolmon). Do this to see which driver uses this tag:

enter image description here

Now, go to the drivers folder (C:\Windows\System32\drivers) and right-click the driver in question (intmsd.sys in the above image example). Click Properties, go to the details tab to find the Product Name. Look for an update for that product.

If the pooltag only shows Windows drivers or is listed in the pooltag.txt ("C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers\x64\triage\pooltag.txt")

you have use xperf to trace what causes the usage. Install the WPT from the Windows SDK, open a cmd.exe as admin and run this:

xperf -on PROC_THREAD+LOADER+POOL -stackwalk PoolAlloc+PoolFree+PoolAllocSession+PoolFreeSession -BufferSize 2048 -MaxFile 1024 -FileMode Circular && timeout -1 && xperf -d C:\pool.etl

capture 30 -60s of the grow. Open the ETL with WPA.exe, add the Pool graphs to the analysis pane.

Put the pooltag column at first place and add the stack column. Now load the symbols inside WPA.exe and expand the stack of the tag that you saw in poolmon.

enter image description here

Now find other 3rd party drivers which you can see in the stack. Here the Thre tag (Thread) is used by AVKCl.exe from G-Data. Look for driver/program updates to fix it.

The user Hristo Hristov provided a trace with a high FMfn usage during unzipping files:

enter image description here

The tag is used by the driver WiseFs64.sys which is part of the "Wise Folder Hider" program. Removing it fixes the leak.

The user Samuil Dichev provided a trace with a high FMic and Irp usage

enter image description here

enter image description here

The tags are used by the program Razor Cortex.

In the sample of the user chr0n0ss the FMic and Irp usage is caused by F-Secure Antivirus Suite:

enter image description here

Removing it and using Windows Defender fixed the issue for him.

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    wow, thanks a lot for such a fast answer to the question that i thought i will never find one :) it seems that network drivers were causing the problem and after updating memory usage seems OK. Thanks again! :)
    – Lukas
    Commented Aug 2, 2015 at 7:36
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    This reminds me of a Mark Russinovich blog post.
    – Sun
    Commented Aug 5, 2015 at 16:18
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    I think the WDK download link you provide is for Win 8. The version for Win 10 is here: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/dn913721.aspx
    – Travis Bemrose
    Commented Aug 27, 2015 at 19:44
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    findstr command does not return anything that could help me pasteboard.co/2HmQZYbN.png
    – Loenix
    Commented Dec 7, 2015 at 16:44
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    NDbf Was high, then I found it was sumsungrapiddskfltr or something, I turned it off, it works good now.
    – Suraj Jain
    Commented Jul 22, 2017 at 4:25
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this guy might have a Killer Networking (previously Bigfoot networking) brand network card.

Was going crazy trying to figure out why I had a massive memory leak and even did a completely clean install and immediately after installing I had a memory leak. Of course I installed my network drivers and video card drivers but that was it.

I searched Google... Found this thread saying it was his network driver then googled "killer memory leak" and saw hits for that and found it was the killer app itself and not just in windows 10.

Now I'm golden... So if anyone else has this issue and they have one of the many gaming boards or laptops that have a killer NIC you can probably just disable the killer app from starting. But what I did was completely uninstall the ASROCK provided driver and then installed the latest driver only package from the official killer networking site. It's the smaller ~30mb download. If your download is closer to or more than 100mb then you got the wrong one.

You'll loose everything that makes the killer stand out (it's QoS software) but that's what a good router is for in the first place... Especially since the killer app only handles the QoS of applications running on your PC and does nothing for your network as a whole.

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    Would have been better to confirm they did. Once they confirmed it then submit an answer. Even if you did that this answer does not explain how to solve the problem.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 18, 2015 at 0:38
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    thanks a lot for you answer. it saved me lots of time. I had the same problem. After reading your answer I just uninstalled Killer app and then only installed the network drivers. Now my windows 10 is working perfectly.
    – Buju
    Commented Dec 13, 2015 at 14:58
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    You saved me, thanks!. I uninstalled the whole Killer suite, and only installed the drivers. Now at startup, my ram usage is 25% (2GB) vs 50%~60% before.
    – nikoskip
    Commented Dec 27, 2015 at 20:13
  • Than you so much!!!
    – srchulo
    Commented Oct 7, 2016 at 5:55
  • Yep, same issue for me, years later with an old version installed. Amusingly the company claims to have addressed the issues:"Some users have reported memory leaks with some versions of our performance suite. The current version of the Killer Control Center has no known instance of memory leaks..." support.killernetworking.com/knowledge-base/…
    – csrowell
    Commented Jan 22, 2021 at 3:37
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The accepted answer by magicandre1981 is the correct answer to this problem, if the RAM usage continues to climb to 100% then there's most likely a memory leak.

However, if you've come to this page because Windows 10's memory usage is high but remaining steady (like in the 60%-90% range), you probably don't have a problem. Windows 10 uses RAM more effectively than past versions. This is because unused RAM is wasted RAM.

Modern operating systems have long swapped infrequently used memory data to a pagefile on the hard drive in order to free up RAM for more frequently needed memory data. (My Win 10 system has 8GB RAM and a 12GB pagefile.) However, it is slow to retrieve this data back from the drive, and Windows 10 will compress infrequently accessed memory and store it in the system process (in the RAM). It's faster to uncompress this data than it is to retrieve it from the hard drive (even an SSD). Just because your RAM is mostly full, does not mean you won't be able to run more things, if more RAM is needed then Win 10 will move some of this compressed memory to the pagefile to free up RAM for new applications.

If you constantly find your system process is using more than 1GB RAM (like I do) than you probably have too many browser tabs open (like I do). An extension like OneTab can help.

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    no, the cache is shown as standby/Cached in Taskmgr. The Win10 Taskmgr compression shows as Working Set usage in SYSTEM process. I already explained this here: superuser.com/a/952142/174557
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 15:25
  • @magicandre1981 What are you saying 'no' to? I don't see a disagreement.
    – Travis Bemrose
    Commented Jun 6, 2016 at 18:28
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    I've found that Windows 10 still aims to keep memory usage below 60%, and any more than this it starts to page. We have alerts on 1000+ devices for when memory usage goes above 80% and the PC's really do start to slow down. Windows 10 may manage it better, but it's also better to keep a large portion of memory free, ready for other processes to use when needed, otherwise, it would have to write back to the disk before freeing up memory which is slow.
    – HippoDuck
    Commented Dec 8, 2017 at 13:21
  • @TravisBemrose This "unused RAM is wasted RAM" idea is debatable. In theory using all ram would allow to use the computer faster. In practice, using all ram creates problems such as the one in this thread which prevents users to use their computer as they would like to, in other words softwares do things that the user never asked them to, which results in more negatives than positives.
    – user9203881
    Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 20:26
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Received this answer out of band from "coolie91", posting it here, basically "it could be adware":

Today, I was able to fix it for good by following the instructions in this link:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/virus-removal/how-to-remove-adware-on-a-pc

The fix: Basically, a whole bunch of malware and extensions had hijacked common programs and riding on them, buried deep inside rootkits and all. They were almost impossible to detect and remove.

This seems to have worked for me as my memory still is ~ 41% after running for almost 2 hours (Phew!!!) Before, I had to reboot every 45 minutes.

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