Windows 10 99% memory usage even when nothing is running

Windows 10 99% memory usage even when nothing is running

Running out of memory while running Windows isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. But since Windows 8, things have mostly gotten better from memory usage/performance.

I recently ran into an issue where I’d close down all of my apps, but leave my system on overnight. When I’d jiggle the mouse in the morning, I would be greeted with horrendously sluggish drive swapping and 100% memory utilization. On a system with 32 gigs of memory. Even worse, I opened up my task manager and shut down everything possible – but nothing was indicated where 25+ gigs of memory went. Bad job Microsoft, shouldn’t your performance tools be able to tell me what is using up 90% of my system memory?

I got a clue from the fact my non-pageable memory usage was huge. This, apparently, indicates a driver or service with a memory leak:
https://windows101tricks.com/fix-memory-leak-problem-on-windows-10/

The problem was the Killer Network Suite. Apparently, this is a pretty common problem with the Killer network driver. I uninstalled it, and the problems seemed to go away.
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/3yzjyz/killer_network_suite_gave_me_a_major_memory_leak/

I then downloaded and installed the DRIVER ONLY package for the network interface by going directly to the Killer network website.

Turns out that the Killer network suite unfortunately lives up to it’s name: it certainly killed all the memory on my system. 🙁

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