Since some time I have memory issues on my PC. There seems to be memory getting allocated for different tasks, but never released again.

This happened now several times during the last months. The memory goes down and down and down, f.ex. yesterday I only had 3% of memory left, this morning it was only 1% anymore, and the PC kind of freezes, you cannot really work anymore with it.

I checked, and there is one svchost task running which took about 11GB of my 12GB memory, and when trying to kill the process, I get an access denied notification, thus making it impossible to get rid of it. Don't know what this one is though, I have of course several of these svchost tasks running, but you cannot tell which one makes what.

So I had to restart the PC, which was also not possible, because it got eventually stuck on the restarting screen, so I had to reset the PC. Back up again, everything was normal, why wouldn't it be anyway, memory was free again, but when I started uTorrent f.ex, there were no torrents anymore, when I started Firefox, it didn't restore my tabs, and also PeerBlock reported some empty lists. Nothing important, but annoying.

I just wanna know if there's one task which is accumulating memory and not releasing it anymore, or could there be something else causing this?
[Reply]

How is your memory at mother board? 4+4+4? Are they all of the same speed and brand?
try to remove one and see if it freezes again, repeat the process and try to isolate the bad one (if it is a memory problem...)
[Reply]

I won't open anything, don't have the patience for that, and I'm 99% sure this is software related, as it happens only sometimes, like once a month or so, if it would be a hardware problem, it obviously wouldn't go away at all.
[Reply]

Biggest culprit for memory leading like is are browsers and torrent clients. It's not happened for some time, but I've had most ram used up and when I've looked in tasks it has been Firefox. Ending its process normally clears it.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
[Reply]

Firefox only took like 1%, uTorrent took 300MB. After closing them, it didn't help, that svchost had still the whole 11GB.

Btw, I have 2x2GB and 2x4GB dual channel RAM. But the hardware is not the issue. Like I said, this happens only from time to time, perhaps even less than once a month, but I have to mention that my PC is running 24/7, restarting it sometimes definitely solves the problem, if existing. Nothing to worry about, just would like to know which svchost it is.
[Reply]

Browsers are almost certainly not the culprit here, but I can confirm that they can use a heck of a lot of memory. On my machine, Opera often used many hundreds of megabytes, especially if I've had things like Flash running.
[Reply]

@ DC

Open up Task Manager under Win8 or 8.1 & disable ALL your Start-up programs.

If under earlier versions of WinBlows, open the run cmd & type "msconfig". Again, disable ALL programs you have on the start-up tab. I can not get my head around this feature of Windows. It does nothing more than soak up Ram in a very unnecessary way. A pointless feature that abuses & uses your system Ram. It might load the program quicker for when you first run the program but it also slows down your computer boot time & strips precious Ram in the process.

Also, it's not a good idea to mix Ram size modules, even more so different speed rated Ram, especially on Dual Channel boards with 4 Simm slots. If you have to, be sure you install the pair of Bigger Ram modules in the primary Dual Channel slots & a word of warning here: - Consult your Mobo manual as to which pair of Coloured Slots are the Primary Pair.
[Reply]

I always check from time to time under msconfig which programs start that I don't need necessarily and I disable them, doing this since I have PCs.

I'm using Win 7 Home Edition 64-bit.
Mainboard is an Asus P7P55D-E LX
Memory Slots 1&3: Patriot DDR3 1333EL Series 2GB modules
Memory Slots 2&4: Corsair DDR3 CMX8GX3M2A1333C9 4GB modules

Like I said, it happens very rarely.
[Reply]

Try putting the higher density modules in Slots 1 & 3.
[Reply]

svchost.exe is the process that runs all windows services. Multiple copies of it can be running at once because each is running different services and one instance of svchost can be running multiple services. One of your services is playing up. To see which service is the issue right click on svchost.exe and select "Go to Service(s)". That will tell you which service it is, and you can use services manager to restart or disable it if you don't need it.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4
[Reply]