Large Memory Usage on Idle - Memory Leak?

[Collider]

I have recently noticed that my machine uses up large amounts of memory when kept on for a while. I dont have any CPU intensive tasks nor torrents running the in the background. When I leave it on overnight, I come back and see 5 GB ram usage, once rebooted it goes back to ~1GB. This is with my first rig in the signature so I have total of 6 GB.

The software I run in the background is: Kaspersky, Ad-Aware, Everest (temp monitoring), TuneUp Utilities 2010, MemInfo, TaskMgr. Checked my start-up list and dont have much else there.

Also checked task mgr for and memory count doesnt add up, svchost.exe & sidebar.exe are both eating up slightly over a 1gb (dont know why side bar needs that much) but other than that everything else is less than 100Mb.

Any ideas on what could be causing this memory leak?

 

[taltamir]

Next time, instead of rebooting, go into task manager and sort programs by memory use. you will find out which one of them is leaking memory.

You can also turn programs off one by one.

 

[VirtualLarry]

You sure it's actively in use, and not just "cached"?

 

[Emulex]

probably the operating system putting pressure on the free ram to force not-frequently used junk to pagefile. this is very common

 

[Collider]

Next time, instead of rebooting, go into task manager and sort programs by memory use. you will find out which one of them is leaking memory.

You can also turn programs off one by one.

Yep - that was the first thing I tried, memory usage listed does not add up to 5GB in task mgr, only got svchost & sidebar @ 1.1 GB each, the rest are less than 100mb ea. All in all comes up to somewhere between 2.5-3.1GB but def not 5.

 

[Voo]

Yep - that was the first thing I tried, memory usage listed does not add up to 5GB in task mgr, only got svchost & sidebar @ 1.1 GB each, the rest are less than 100mb ea. All in all comes up to somewhere between 2.5-3.1GB but def not 5.

Which most probably means that you're confusing available/free/cached memory in one way or the other.

Where exactly are you looking for what exact numbers?

 

[Binky]

Windows Sidebar is using 1.1gb of memory?

 

[taltamir]

probably the operating system putting pressure on the free ram to force not-frequently used junk to pagefile. this is very common

1. Superfetch is loading frequently used junk, not infrequently used junk.
2. This is not listed as used ram.

Yep - that was the first thing I tried, memory usage listed does not add up to 5GB in task mgr, only got svchost & sidebar @ 1.1 GB each, the rest are less than 100mb ea. All in all comes up to somewhere between 2.5-3.1GB but def not 5.

svchost is a generic MS wrapper for a generic MS dll for doing networking stuff. A bunch of MS stuff as well as 3rd party software uses it.
Try turning things off until that 1 svchost that is over a gig goes down. It can also be used by malware occasionally.

The 1.1gig sidebar is... odd. what sidebar exactly?

 

[Voo]

svchost is a generic MS wrapper for a generic MS dll for doing networking stuff. A bunch of MS stuff as well as 3rd party software uses it.

Actually svchost is a wrapper for a bunch of different processes/services of the OS that are bundled because unlike Unix a process takes a considerable (well ok that was more of a reason when they invented it, not many would care about a few mb of ram here or there today) amount of memory and other resources. Networking is only one part of that.

But 1.1gb is still extremely large for it (the largest for me is 110k all together less than 200k), but I've got no idea how to find out which service uses how much memory easily. You can find out which services are in the offending svchost instance by using tasklist /SVC /FI "IMAGENAME eq svchost.exe".
Afterwards I'd create isolated processes for all of those and see who's the offender. sc config <service name> type= own (the blank is important!) and restarting the peculiar service should do the trick for that (to change it back use type= share)

 

[masteryoda34]

Windows Sidebar is using 1.1gb of memory?

Yeah, this sounds quite suspicious to me.