System and compressed memory process, never completely idle

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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This is on a new ThinkPad 11e laptop (really a netbook class device). This is with a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro, only Chrome and drivers installed.

The CPU never reaches completely idle. This stupid "System and compressed memory" process is always running at 4-8% CPU. For a laptop, where battery life is sort of an important thing, this is highly annoying. On my desktop here, I see the process using about 0% CPU most of the time, occasionally jumping up to 0.2%. Clearly this 4-8% constant strain isn't normal.

I'm going to check some of my older laptops and see if it's an issue across the board.

Anyone have any ideas?
 

RampantAndroid

Diamond Member
Jun 27, 2004
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That process houses non-used memory. Are you running a lot of processes/are you running low on memory?
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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That process houses non-used memory. Are you running a lot of processes/are you running low on memory?

The laptop has 4GB of RAM, 3.4GB usable after GPU takes some. The process is active and consuming 4-8% of CPU at all times, even after a fresh reboot with nothing running, where it shows only 1.1 GB of RAM used.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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5EKGxJ9.jpg


This is what it looks like. Computer completely idle, yet the above mentioned process churning away at 4-8% CPU, all the time, forever.
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
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Just for the sake of sharing information I'm not seeing this on my laptop. It's a cheapie Toshiba upgraded to Win 10 Home. Mine never achieves a steady state though. CPU usage is bouncing around all the time with a variety of processes taking precedence.
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Thanks.

On a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet, running Windows 10, I don't notice the issue.
The process is there, and sometimes using CPU, but it seems to settle down to 1% or less.

On an X130e thinkpad laptop, I see the same issue. One thing in common is both thinkpads
have AMD CPU, maybe some connection there - perhaps on of the default drivers in Windows
10 for the AMD chipset.
 
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JackMDS

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Oct 25, 1999
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Lucky for us Computer components are Not "Unionized" so let them work if they want to.



:cool:
 

John Connor

Lifer
Nov 30, 2012
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I had this problem on my Win 7 laptop and read it has to do with the audio enchantments option in the sound options. So I turned that off and the CPU utilization went down, but was still active. I ran Process explorer and found gadgets to consume CPU cycles, so I got rid of all except the weather gadget. It's better now, but not completely.

Now my desktop running Win 7 isn't using CPU cycles at idle at all. Don't quit understand.

Seen as how Win 10 has a lot of privacy concerns and App crap, I wonder if that's it?
 

Chiropteran

Diamond Member
Nov 14, 2003
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Mystery solved, mostly. I manually updated to the latest AMD video drivers after installing Windows 10. Well, I uninstalled the AMD drivers, and the "system and compressed memory" task went down to 0% while idle, perfect. Except this was running with a generic video driver from Microsoft, which doesn't offer any 3d acceleration.

So instead of installing the latest driver from AMD directly, I just installed the video drivers from Windows Update. Interestingly, the problem came back, in a greatly reduced form. "system and compressed memory" is now showing 1-2% CPU usage. It never seems to drop to 0 completely, but this is acceptable to me where the previous 4-8% wasn't. I am not sure if it is the video driver exactly, or one of the other drivers associated with it (for example, the hdmi audio driver is also installed by the same package). At this point I don't care too much, problem is basically solved. I'll try the next official driver release eventually, but this is acceptable for now.
 

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
3,477
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Consider yourself lucky, some people are having worse "loads".

I recently did a clean install of win10 on my laptop.
Ever since then the process called "System memory and compressed memory" has been running at around 15-25% cpu load constantly. It never stops, even when letting the computer idle for hours. The laptop has a particularly annoying fan so this is problematic.

I was under the imrpession the point of this process is to compress in order to save RAM, but I have 12GB RAM and only 1.5 - 2GB are in use, it seems a bit premature for this process to start.

I have no other win10 systems to compare it to, so I was wondering if this is normal behaviour, and if not, anybody know of a solution?

So far I have tried to disable Superfetch, to no avail.

Another one.
I think its a problem with windows itself, If it continues, I will revert to windows 8.1
 
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