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Fork90's avatar
Fork90
Copper Contributor
Mar 03, 2026

Seeming memory leak in Win 11

Hello,

 

For the past couple months I have been experiencing a weird issue on my windows machine. Usually around 8  or so hours after a clean reboot, task manager will start reporting 170+GB of 190GB of RAM is in use when the system is basically idle. However, when I tally the entire list of processes I can only account for 4GB in use. When I use RAMMap its the same story, I can account for 4GB and it appears windows has simply misplaced a 150GB of memory. The only other symptom I notice is when I shutdown, the shutdown process will take 40+ minutes sometimes as if some process is refusing to die. This does not occur when I shutdown while memory usage appears normal.

 

So far I have tried:
Using different web browsers and uninstalling the one I had been using. 
Removing pretty much every piece of software I have been using while the issue occurred.
Ensured windows, firmware and drivers were properly updated. 

community

6 Replies

  • Fork90's avatar
    Fork90
    Copper Contributor
    Mar 05, 2026

    This is not intend to be posted, but rather a question for the mods. Why are my replies never posting? I have replied to Jim twice now and neither have been accepted, one after 24 hours and one after almost 12. 

     

    Given how many times I have received proxy errors / 502s while refreshing this forum maybe the replies got lost, but I have my doubts. I'm more likely to assume that me asking for evidence that the shutdown issue was a different problem was seen as rude. I'm sorry, but if you're going to let someone with zero accepted answers  make a wild assertion with zero evidence, you had better be prepared to let someone demand evidence.



     

    • Fork90's avatar
      Fork90
      Copper Contributor
      Mar 08, 2026

      I've generally not had need for an AV beyond defender since 8, but I did give it a fair try with their free trial. The only things it classified as "potentially unwanted" was a perfectly legitimate torrenting program used for OSS ISOs. Zero malware results. 

  • Jim Butts's avatar
    Jim Butts
    Copper Contributor
    Mar 03, 2026

    Windows usually doesn't lose RAM can you post in use, available, committed , cached and paged pool numbers?  The shutdown issue is a different problem.

    • Fork90's avatar
      Fork90
      Copper Contributor
      Mar 04, 2026

      It took a while for the issue to resurface for me to get some hard numbers. Around 9:25PM I woke my computer from sleep mode and a few minutes after waking it I realized my ram usage was rising linearly in task manager. I can't remember for certain if this has always started after a wakeup, but I will try to keep track from now on. Over the past hour I have went from 22gb in use to 139gb in use. During this time the only process showing over 1GB of memory in use was firefox at 1.8gb roughly and every process together accounted for right at 5033MB.

      Here is a table of the requested stats over the past hour. Pardon the rough formatting, tabs apparently vex this forum. 

      In Use	Compressed	Committed		Cached	Paged pool Non-paged pool
44		81.5MB			48/202			1.6		21.1		3.8
50.5	78.3MB			55/202			1.9		26.6		4.5
73.9	39.5MB			78/202			2.1		47.1		7.1
103		46.8MB			107/202		2.3		72.3		10.3
109		46.8MB			118/202		6.4		81.6		11.5
141		1.1GB			150/202		14.3	110			15.0
139		1.1GB			148/202		14.3	108			14.8

       

      Can you explain how you have eliminated the shutdown being related? I'll admit a 100% correlation does not imply causation, but I'd like to repeat the steps you did to prove this. 

       

      Cheers, 
      Fork

    • Fork90's avatar
      Fork90
      Copper Contributor
      Mar 03, 2026

      Hello,

      Sorry I don't have those number currently, but the next time I encounter the issue I will be sure to record that as well as a few other things so we have a clean picture.

      In the meantime, you sound very certain in your dismissal of the shutdown issue being related despite a 100% correlation. I'm completely aware correlation does not imply causation, however can you explain when you had physical access to my machine and what experiments you ran to conclude this? I would like to independently verify your results.

       

      Cheers,

      Fork