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I've been having problems on Windows 10: periodically I get a "low memory" warning. A lot of the Super User questions on this topic talk about driver memory leaks, but as I'll explain below mine doesn't fit the criteria found with those. What normally happens for me is my page file gets to about 70-80 GB in size as my "System and Compressed" memory grows. Eventually I start getting low memory warnings until I reboot, and then I'm good again for 5-8 days.
There are a lot of people who complain about System & Compressed memory growing to the point where it causes problems, but unfortunately the common cause (driver memory leak) in those doesn't appear to be immediately the problem for me.
Firstly, Windows 10 high memory usage (unknown reason) covers a common problem. However, note that a key indicator in that scenario is a high "Non-Paged" memory usage. In my scenario, non-paged memory is not being used that much; I have 16 GB of memory, and I can have 8-9 GB of "System and Compressed Memory" and less than 1 GB of non-paged memory.
The question I linked to suggested utilizing the PoolMon tool. I have done that. The high Nonp processes I've observed have been those with the tag "Thre" and "Py28" and from what I can tell these are not drivers (most Q&A on high system memory usage in Windows 10 will point you to a driver leak).
Another symptom of my issue is that the longer the system is left on, the larger the pagefile gets. For example, before the last reboot the pagefile got to be about 60 GB in size. Also note that I see on my Task Manager screen "Committed" values regularly in the "12.3/50-60 GB range." I have no idea if that is normal or not. But it would at least seem "weird" to me for my page file to get so large.
Edit: Let me make clear what I'm asking here. I am asking, "How can I tell what application is using so much of my system's memory when it appears that System & compressed memory is obscuring the root memory hog from me." Note that again, I have a pagefile that gets up to 80 GB or so in size and NO single application has high memory usage, only the "System and compressed memory" system process. Under older versions of Windows I knew how to tell what applications were using so much memory, but NONE show abnormal memory use now. I don't know if this is because System and compressed memory is "being helpful" and helping manage the memory so the system can run for much longer without running out of it, or what, but I know that I'm running out of memory on my system and no application EVER shows abnormal memory usage in task manager. I'm asking how to find out what is causing this. The closest I've found to an answer for this suggests using PoolMon and looking for an offending driver using large amounts of non-paged memory, but unlike people who have had driver memory leaks, my non-paged memory usage is never very high at all, and no drivers are listed as high memory users when I ran PoolMon.
1You did look at the “Commit size” column in Task Manager, right? “System and compressed memory” being large is probably just a result but not the reason. – Daniel B – 2016-04-10T07:29:48.567
I agree--and perhaps I should make that more clear. I don't believe System and compressed memory is causing my system to use so much memory. But I do believe that under older versions of Windows if you have an application running with a memory leak you'll see its memory usage grow in task manager infinitely making it easy to identify. It appears System and compressed memory obscures from me what is using up this memory over time. – Brandon – 2016-04-10T16:44:18.250
Is the memory usage accounted for as commit size? Or not? – David Schwartz – 2016-04-10T17:25:21.980
I’m a little confused. You say that you periodically get “low memory” warnings and eventually reboot. Is your system crashing? Is its performance degrading so that you feel the need to reboot? Or are you rebooting just because the messages are a nuisance? (And, if so, how much of a nuisance? Three per day? One every three minutes?) – Scott – 2016-04-10T23:18:33.323
David, when the system has been running for awhile it will show committed memory very high, like 60gb+.
Scott, I haven't ever had the system genuinely crash due to being out of memory. But I do start getting nuisance low memory warnings. Additionally some things I need to do like spin up a Hyper-V VM will refuse to start saying there isn't enough memory available, so it does have a genuine negative impact. – Brandon – 2016-04-11T04:55:18.610
OK, if you have a program that you can run shortly after you reboot, but not after a week, and it says that there isn't enough memory available, but you don't know why, then that's an important part of the situation. I suggest that you [edit] the question to clarify that you are suffering from actual symptoms of running out of memory, and not just annoying messages. – Scott – 2016-04-12T04:13:43.083
@Brandon: BTW, if you “address” your comment like this, the addressee will be notified; otherwise, nobody will be aware of your comment. (Well, that's an oversimplification — the author of the post [question or answer] is always notified, and, if somebody posts a question or an answer, and a second person posts a comment, and then the first person posts a comment, the second person will be notified. See How do comment @replies work? for more information.) A limitation of the system is that you can have only one addressee per comment.
– Scott – 2016-04-12T04:28:12.917