Memory usage doesn't add up in Windows 10
Every few days of uptime the memory usage of my PC increases without any obvious reason. Here is a typical memory usage reading after 4 days of uptime:
However, I've tried to trace the offending application causing any potential memory leaks. Task Manager lists the highest app usage from Google Chrome (with only ~200MB usage):
Closing other apps still leaves 62% mysteriously in use:
Meanwhile, poolmon.exe
shows CM16
and Proc
tags are listed using high amounts of memory in the Paged and Nonpaged pools, respectively:
Strangely, restarting the PC clears up memory usage, but shutting down and starting up doesn't. I assume this is due to the "fast startup" feature, but I'm not sure why it would affect memory usage.
If it matters, I am also using CleanMem as I assumed it would help alleviate any memory leak problems.
Given these, how could I pinpoint what is causing high memory usage in my system?
UPDATE: I tried to run xperf to view stack traces on the pool tags, as suggested in a comment, but I am not sure what to make of what I have found:
UPDATE: Here is the ETL file of the above screenshot
From the CleanMem about page:
"The memory is pushed to the system cache, not the page file. The system cache is still in memory. And a program can call back what it needs instantly"
AKA, running "CleanMem" just hides memory behind the system in the cache, so you don't see it being used.
Generally, any kind of "memory management" tool in Windows is a bad idea.
Why? Because especially in an OS as complicated as Windows 10, using some "tweak" to try to get more memory is probably just going to make the existing memory management algorithms get confused. Windows has extremely advanced built-in memory management, compression, caching, and prediction. Don't mess with it. Need to free memory? Use Firefox instead of Chrome.
Also, check out the SysInternalsSuite tool procexp.exe. It is a lot easier to read than xperf:
Another process you may not see using memory would be if you have Hyper-V installed and are running any virtual machines within it.