3

Did not notice this issue after upgrading to Windows 11 a couple of months back, but recently my RAM was 99% used several times and remained at 99% used even after closing all running programs other than background apps. Needless to say, computer became unresponsive and I had to reboot to return RAM usage back to normal.

Here is the Task Manager screenshot:

Task Manager

I opened up the Resource Monitor and none of the running tasks were using inordinate amount of memory:

Resource Monitor

I fired up Sysinternals Process Explorer and it did not provide any additional clues:

Process Explorer

Process Explorer Sys Info provided more details than Resource Monitor but still nothing gave me a clue what exactly is happening here and what is taking up all that memory:

enter image description here

Any idea how to figure out what exactly is eating up all that RAM when this happens next time?

  • Windows 11 Version 21H2 (OS Build 22000.469)
  • MSI MEG X570 Unify with latest BIOS and AMD ComboAm4v2PI 1.2.0.5
  • 32 GB of RAM
Dean Kuga
  • 719

1 Answers1

1

I believe I just caught the culprit and it is PowerToys Always On Top feature. I noticed my computer was slow and opened the Task Manager to find PowerToysAlwaysOnTop process using some CPU time and although the memory used was displayed as 1 MB as soon as I killed it my memory used dropped from 98% to 18%.

I disabled that feature of PowerToys and will update this reply if memory leak happens again while the feature is disabled.

enter image description here

Dean Kuga
  • 719