How to track down why 3-4GB of memory being used up as soon as the PC starts?

Question

When I try to do findstr on these non page drives, I either get a really large error strain, or nothing.

Even when all the applications are closed, I still see 3-4 gigs of RAM being used.

This is a big deal because certain programs I run are very ram intensive and I don't want the ram to be going to a leaking driver.

The findstr code I was trying to run was findstr /s __ *.*. when I tried to seek out these drives which have very high usage, I didn't get anything

I am having a very hard time trying to find which driver exactly it is.

Answer 1

Modern versions of Windows use large amount of memory and 4GB is not unexpected with the latest versions of Windows 10 despite them saying that 2GB is enough. From experience 4GB is the minimum I would suggest for latest editions of Windows 10 and I have had difficulties reducing a clean install below 3GB RAM use on a 4GB machine.

Windows simply has a lot running by default. Much of it may get pushed out to the page file over the course of simply using the machine.

In your poolmon shot Nvrm is using 27150880 bytes. That is 26,514 kilobytes or 25.89 megabytes. That is not really a sign of a serious driver leak that would be causing significant memory problems. I would expect to see a far larger number if there were issues (such as this question showing 5GB of nonpaged pool). Findstr may also not be the right tool for finding text in binary files, at the very least you would want to limit the types of files it searches. That question suggested using *.sys instead of *.* to find the offending file.

A quick Google search seems to suggest that nvrm may be a part of the Nvidia display driver and I do not think that 26MB being used in the nonpaged pool seems particularly outlandish for a display driver that has to manage a significant part of your system and may need buffers in the kernel that are guaranteed to be available. Your total nonpaged pool is only 221MB and the paged pool is 410MB which is actually pretty good. Mine are currently 463MB and 370MB respectively.

On every system I've used recently 4GB used after boot is pretty normal. Windows is just doing more and using more memory these days. Unless you are actually having a problem running something I don't see an issue.

If you believe that you have memory issues then as Daniel mentions in the comments the Task Manager memory view would be the first place to look, or I would check the tool RAMMap which can give a better fast overview of what is being used where.

In RAMMap you can play with getting the operating system to free up things like the Standby list and working sets but this will mainly just have the effect of pushing RAM out to page files or releasing program buffers that will be refilled over time. I used the "Empty Standby list" and then "Empty Working Set" Options and it brought my memory usage down from 10GB to 2GB briefly, but over about 10 minutes has quickly come back up to 6.5GB.