Memory Leak or RAM eating ghost?

[DeeJay1981]

Hello all. I'm new to these forums and hope I can learn a lot from this site. Anyway, here's my problem:

I've been running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit for a long while now. I did a fresh install a few months back for the following problem as well as others, but the problem I'm going to discuss is getting overly annoying. I leave my computer on all the time often for days, and have been noticing that my RAM usage creeps up without usage. Sure I use my computer often, but overnight when I've freshly restarted prior to going to bed I've noticed my RAM goes from about 17% usage to about 25% usage. I often leave Firefox on and I know that it uses up RAM, but without my surfing or watching videos or doing anything on the internet why would my RAM usage go up with no user interaction at all? I've checked the process list for all users, checked the resource monitor, but I haven't been able to find what program is slowly eating up my RAM. It's almost as if my memory is being used by nothing. I've run virus scans that come up clean. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? I greatly appreciate any and all help.

 

[TrainableMan]

Well several things may run on their own, such as anti-virus scans & system updates, etc. But a good probability is the search indexer is updating; this happens periodically to improve the speed/results of searches.

 

[Shintaro]

This can be difficult to track down.
A couple of things:
Certain versions of FireFox are know to have memory leak problems.
The Add-ons do auto-magically use memory.

I would suggest:

- Run autoruns (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb963902) to make sure you know what is running. Usually 3rd party apps have problems.
- Run process Explorer (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896653) take a screen capture and compare it in the morning. There is probably a better way of doing that. But anyway...

Hope this helps.

 

[Digerati]

I agree the Indexer can eat up resources but Windows 7 Indexer does not keep eating resources. Unlike past operating systems where the Indexer could bring a system to a crawl, the Indexer in Windows 7 is much more refined, and I do not recommend disabling it.

This should not be hard to figure out.

Start Task Manager and go to the Processes tab. Sort on the Commit Size column with the largest numbers on top. Write the first 4 or 5 down, then walk away. Come back hours later and check the Commit Size again. The values should remain close to the same, or drop.

Any that have gone up significantly should be suspect. I note SuperAntiSpyware, when run in real-time mode, will continue to eat up RAM on my system.