Help fixing a memory leak (Resource monitor pics included)

it is only issue if you have chrome running?

Confused, is that SEVENTEEN Chrome tabs/windows open??

For Firefox it lists each tab individually.

You might have a bitcoin miner infection running on minimised screens

Chrome spawns another copy of itself with every tab you open. This is to prevent the situation where a script in one tab crashes, and all your other open tabs disappear along with it. The damage is instead limited to a single tab. So its memory footprint can grow pretty large as you open more tabs.

Unfortunately, Chrome has had a multi-year bug where the memory taken up by a tab isn't always completely released when you close the tab (a memory leak). That results in the amount of memory it uses gradually increasing. The only fix is to completely close Chrome. Depending on how you've got it set up, this may simply require closing every Chrome window, or may require you to manually kill it in task manager. The amount of free RAM you have and the RAM taken up by different tabs will determine how often you have to do this.

The sites you open up in your tabs will influence the amount of RAM the tab takes. I just checked my Chrome use and it's got 25 processes (I've only got 2 tabs opened currently, but have been running Chrome continuously for a couple days now), but only takes about 500 MB. If you browse a site which uses a lot of RAM, the Chrome memory leak can result in that memory not being released after you leave the site. Which may explain your situation with Chrome having just 17 processes but using nearly 2 GB of RAM. If you can figure out which site is causing the problem, you can try to be more judicious about when you visit that site. Maybe even visit it using a different browser. (Firefox and IE had similar memory leak bugs, but running it in a different browser means you can close the browser completely when you're done, freeing up the leaked memory.)

All that said, your Chrome instance is only taking up less than 2 GB of RAM. Your Task Manager shot is showing you're at 6.4 GB of RAM used out of 8 GB. If this is after a reboot with no programs running, then something else is eating up your RAM, not Chrome. In your first picture, click on where it says "80% Memory" in Task manager. That will sort the processes by the amount of RAM they're using (you may need to click it a second time to sort it highest-first instead of lowest-first).

Update your Killer LAN network card drivers and reboot.

In the future, please post system specs

If you take a look at those screenshots that you posted you'll notice that the non-paged memory pool is very high. This is almost always the result of a memory leak in a driver. 99% of the time the culprit is a Killer LAN network card running the generic Windows drivers. This is a known issue.

However, it seems like you're in the 1% here, and not the good 1%. You seem to have a memory leak in the kernel somewhere but I have no idea what it is.

The only thing that I can recommend is going through all of your drivers systematically and making sure that they're up to date.

No need to format... yet.

Kernel memory leaks are difficult to diagnose because they're not easily attributed to a user process. User processes are auditable via Task Manager, not so with the kernel. Fortunately there's a tool similar to Task Manager for the Windows Kernel. Unfortunately, this tool no longer ships with Windows. Fortunately, it's easily downloaded.

Download the Windows Driver Kit from the link below and install

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/download-the-wdk

You do not need to install Visual Studio, just the driver kit. Once you have it installed, run poolmon.exe in a command line with the /b and /p parameters

In other words, open a command prompt in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Tools\x64" as Administrator in the folder containing poolmon.exe and run "poolmon.exe /b /p". Post a screenshot, the culprit should be at the top.

Alternatively, navigate to the folder in explorer and shift-right-click->"Open powershell window here" and type "poolmon.exe /p /b"

Apologies, Powershell search path is a bit goofy. Type "./poolmon.exe -b -p" instead

Nothing stands out yet, it looks like you recently rebooted your computer. In one of the previous posts your non-paged memory pool was at 2.5GiB which is enormous. If this continues to creep up, it indicates a memory leak in the kernel. Wait for a bit until this climbs and do the same thing again.

EDIT: out of curiosity, are you running any Razor software such as Razor Cortex?

1. 2GiB on idle is not unusual. The total amount of memory used is not merely the sum of the memory allocated to each process; kernel memory needs to be included as well.

2. Yes, always.

Not using task manager no. It's quite a bit more complicated than that.