Memory Crash?

[DC44]

I'm wondering if I could get some help here. I have an Acer laptop. After about 2-3 days I get a prompt to tell me to close programs due to low memory. Within a short time programs/windows will start to crash until I restart the computer.

I have 6GB of ram. I took a screen shot below and circled the issue area. I don't understand computer cache very much other than it's related to ram and sort of a storage on your hard drive for ram, and used as a memory dump area but I could be wrong. Once the circled area hits around 28GB I start to have problems and get the close program prompt.It starts off with 13.5GB as the max and increase over time but doesn't go down.

I'm not as familiar with computer tech as in the past. Could someone give me a clue to what could be going on and/or suggestions on how to prevent my laptop from memory crashing every 2-3 days without shutting it off. I'm running windows 8.1 and I'm not a fan of it. I was perfectly fine with windows 7 on my old acer laptop and didn't have this issue, that I can recall of.

 

[BearZDefect]

I'm no expert, but that looks like a very high "Committed" value. I'd look through the list of processes in the "Processes" and "Details" tabs to find which is/are consuming memory in excess.

 

[PandaBear]

Cache is a "copy of most recently or most frequently used memory" in a faster tier region.

What it means is: to your hard drive, your RAM is much faster so your most likely will be used files has a copy in RAM to save you time. Your RAM also has a much faster and smaller copy of your most likely will be used section in your CPU's internal RAM (those L1 / L2 / L3 cache you heard about when people discuss CPU).

In your case, since you only has 6GB of RAM, if you use too much it will go use your hard drive to act as RAM (swap files), and when you use too much it will slows you down. The "committed" section is likely how much swap space you used.

What you see is not memory crash but a program ran rouge, using up too much RAM and not release it when done (what we called memory leak in the industry). If you can find out which program it is and close it on a regular basis, you will be fine.

 

[DC44]

I agree. It starts out low and steadily increases. My biggest offender is usually a web browser as I stream a lot of video. Even If I close my web browser it doesn't help. At max I usually only use about 3.8GB/6GB or ram. How does the 'Committed' value play into things?

 

[DC44]

Originally Posted By: PandaBear
What you see is not memory crash but a program ran rouge, using up too much RAM and not release it when done (what we called memory leak in the industry). If you can find out which program it is and close it on a regular basis, you will be fine.



Panda, I forgot that I ran across this possibility when I was doing some research. How would I go about looking for a memory leak? Could my antivirus software be the possible source. I don't really have many programs outside of the what came with the computer program installed. Could open office possible cause a memory leak? I usually have a couple of spreadsheets always opened for easy access.

 

[OVERKILL]

Take a look under the processes tab, are there any applications with obscene amounts of memory allocated?

 

[razel]

6GB is plenty of RAM. Look at the graphs. RAM available is 60%. It looks like your disk was busy 100% for awhile and just before you took the screen shot it dropped to 24%.

If it helps place your mouse over the bars under memory composition. 'In Use' and 'Free' are obvious. The rest is available 'Standby' or ready to be available 'Modified'. Windows is very clever with RAM. When a program is done, it's files aren't zero-ed from RAM. It remembers what and where a file is in RAM and it is available for overwriting. Performance is sped up since it grabs program files or common Windows program libraries from RAM instead of disk.

So at that screenshot 60% of RAM is available. Since you mention the only time it happens is streaming, I'd look into the browser or plugin as having a leak. Youtube uses Flash or HTML5. Netflix uses Silverlight. Those are all seriously well programmed. OK, OK... Flash is a mess. I'm glad it's less important.

I suggest running Windows updates. If you use Chrome or Firefox, update your browser and whatever plugin is used for streaming. Then clear your cache. Then chkdsk your hard drive. After which I'd then run Windows Defender and to look for a virus or spyware.

Chances are you could probably are just out of drive space

or your pagefile was set to zero. Best of luck.

 

[DC44]

Nothing that I would consider out of the ordinary. Biggest offender right now is chrome but I usually use IE as my browser. The programs with highest usage still add up to less than 1GB of ram. This has been perplexing me since once I shut my browser down, most programs of the other processes use 10MB or less ram space.

 

[razel]

How many Chrome windows were you using at the time of that last screenshot? If it's none, then Chrome has a leak. Check your extensions in Chrome.

 

[OVERKILL]

Doesn't look unusual to me assuming you have a few tabs open in Chrome.

 

[DC44]

3 at the time. I use chrome sparingly. I can't log into bigtog from IE. For the most part I use IE but I go to chrome when IE gets buggy or lags. I've had trouble with IE since the 8.1 update but this problem has been occurring well before the update.

 

[OVERKILL]

Not sure if Process Explorer runs on 8, but you can give it a try, as it may give us some more useful information:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

 

[DC44]

Thanks Overkill, I downloaded the program. If I were looking for a memory leak, what would I look for?

 

[loyd]

It looks to me as if your high video streaming is being cached and consuming hard drive space. I have my browser set to NOT cache all pages. Makes broswing a little slower, but doesn't fill up cache so fact.

 

[DC44]

How would I set up my browser not to cache at all? Would I change the Temporary storage file space?

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: DC44
Thanks Overkill, I downloaded the program. If I were looking for a memory leak, what would I look for?


Look for something with elevated memory usage. Can you post a screenshot of what that tool shows?

 

[nleksan]

I would be curious to see what happens if you disabled the page file....

Regardless of whether you are willing to try, I would still change the it from "Windows Managed" to manual, and set the min and Max to the same number, between 1 and 1.5x the amount of RAM.

A difficult to diagnose but frequent issue I see is the dedicated LBA's on the hard drive, for the page file, are instructed to grow by the OS, but to a level where there are no more free blocks in the same area on the disk. Consequently, the page file is extended but the new stuff is put very far inward, the slowest part of the disk, and the OS is basically having the arms swing back and forth constantly, further dropping any speed.
The result is heavy fragmentation, out of order execution errors, and horrible cache thrashing.

I would be surprised if a set amount of disk space for page file didn't at least significantly decrease crash frequency.

 

[PandaBear]

If you have enough memory and never run something that use a lot of RAM, you may be ok, I did that for years.

Until you suddenly run a big program and it crash / get stuck, and your system becomes very slow. Since then I leave the swap file alone alone.