Windows 10, Memory leaks, solved, Alienware 17-R3

Your thread has had 75 views but no replies. Which can only mean that the other Alienware laptop owners are not seeing the issue.

This is a strange statement, "to clean the leaked memory out of the bottom of the laptop casing, I don't want it clogging up the vents and causing cooling issues.". A memory stick cannot leak liquid so I hope that was some sort of joke.

Dell would only replace memory if it fails the Alienware Diagnostic test.

Hi,  I can understand your frustration.  Uh,  Did you say you went a week without rebooting?    Windows 10 is surely better about memory leak than say Windows 98.  Every time I hear 'memory leak' I do a double clutch, it is a poor description of what is happening.   It really refers to the OS not recovering memory that it previously used, and is not currently using and memory is not returned to the pool of available memory.   In the really old days of computers, We called the programs that did that "Garbage Collection."  M$ was correct in not implementing garbage collection in Windows 98, as it would cause the machine response to die.   In effect, whatever 'Garbage Collection" that needed would be accomplished by rebooting the computer.  In effect, when an office employee went to lunch, they should have automatically do a full power off, power on restart of their computer.  

I am not just recollecting, I am trying to give a context to this issue.  When I got my Apple Mac Book Pro in 2009, I had a discussion on this same issue with the MBP.   The trainer, said, taking the advice of the Geniuses (apple-speak for technical support people)  said that they never closed the cover of the machine without powering it off.   While the OS X was supposed to do that kind of thing without a hitch, it sometimes lost bits here and there.  Just knowing what was involved with the hardware caused them power the machine off and back on, rather than using save features, or letting it just lie around awhile and letting it idle-power save mode on its own.  

There is also the possibility of turning off as many programs on the start up list.  Not using a lot of programs at one time to stay out of using virtual memory.   Also, Mac OS X did a better job of recovering memory that previously had been in use. 

Bottom line.  Restart your machine every so often.  Don't let this power save features or just closing the lid to extend times between times of completely restarting the machine.   Look not at the task manager for what you can stop, but the large programs you are trying to run at the same time.   If you were doing something like video editing (a lot of memory) and you want to start doing something else memory intensive;  Power down the machine, and power it back on.  

Look at any back up programs, like the Windows file save, or cloud program that might be accumulating things to back up.  Not that backup is bad, just it can be a problem with limited memory.  

"to clean the leaked memory out of the bottom of the laptop casing, I don't want it clogging up the vents and causing cooling issues.".

i would also like to know what is meant by this comment...

being a 256 gig SSD' is it possible the drive is getting nearly full... (would like to see this)

i know i cant use anythign under 1tb  to much games :O

for what its worth id like to see whats using  all the ram.. it says  almost 50% so almost 8 gigs used...  but screen shots barely shows 1/8 of whats used....

also im running ark survival game servers on windows 10, and anyone that knows the game.. its a ram hog, the one server has an uptime of almost a year and still dosent see more then  6  gigs used at any given time.. so i would like to see whas hogging all your resources .. rather then  a tiny portion of whats used..

for what its worth id like to see whats using  all the ram.. it says  almost 50% so almost 8 gigs used...  but screen shots barely shows 1/8 of whats used....   also im running ark survival game servers on windows 10, and anyone that knows the game.. its a ram hog, the one server has an uptime of almost a year and still dosent see more then  6  gigs used at any given time.. so i would like to see whas hogging all your resources .. rather then  a tiny portion of whats used..

Look, I described the problem and how it was fixed, and I'm happy with how my memory is being used; the problem isn't how much memory is being used as such, but how much memory is not being released after use, and that isn't really visible to the user.

You've missed what the screenshots show, which is just the different amounts of memory allocated to scvhost (before, and after the fix).

I expect memory use to be high, because I use Chrome and have many dozens of tabs open at the same time. Its no big deal, and the system runs fine used this way.

Your thread has had 75 views but no replies. Which can only mean that the other Alienware laptop owners are not seeing the issue.

Has replies now :-)

Good news indeed, however it may be that my post is still helpful.

This is a strange statement, "to clean the leaked memory out of the bottom of the laptop casing, I don't want it clogging up the vents and causing cooling issues.". A memory stick cannot leak liquid so I hope that was some sort of joke.

That would be absurd, even bubble memory didn't have liquid in it.

I'd expect something more like a fine dust, made of lots of little bits.

Dell would only replace memory if it fails the Alienware Diagnostic test.

Uh, so no warranty replacement then? :-)

Dell would only replace memory if it fails the Alienware Diagnostic test. Memory does not physically "leak" anything into the case.

Thanks for the writeup Hindesite, I landed on this page because I'm suffering exactly the same problem that you described with the same model Alienware.

I'm just about to have a look at your suggested fix...I thought I'd chime in to this thread as you seem to be getting excessive abuse for trying to help frustrated users like myself.  

I would also describe this problem as a memory leak and I don't think a modern operating system should require regular reboots to work properly.  I could easily go a month or more on Windows 7 without a problem and my Linux boxes probably go more than 6 months!  Regular reboots on Windows 10 machines are enforced by Windows update anyway....Although it may not be a coincidence that my Windows 10 machine that gets the least use is the one with the problem.

Anyway, I'll report back here if my fix turns out to be the same or similar to your write up.

Thanks

IR

I had the exact same issue with an Area 51 R2.  I could not go 24 hours without hitting 98% used RAM.  Sometimes within 6 hours.  I finally did a full format and reinstall of Win 10.  The issue has not recurred.  

I now have win 10 on a USB drive.  All the Dell downloads for my machine on another drive and rdy if it happens again.

Thanks for the writeup Hindesite, I landed on this page because I'm suffering exactly the same problem that you described with the same model Alienware.   I'm just about to have a look at your suggested fix...I thought I'd chime in to this thread as you seem to be getting excessive abuse for trying to help frustrated users like myself.

I'm used to it, it goes with the territory. People who don't have the problem don't believe it exists; those that do have it may not have found this post yet; and then there are those who don't read (or understand) the full post and feel compelled to contribute anyway. And there is also the humour impaired, but humour often doesn't work on the Internet anyway, where not everybody uses the same first language. Easier to assume the OP is just stupid :-)

I would also describe this problem as a memory leak and I don't think a modern operating system should require regular reboots to work properly.  I could easily go a month or more on Windows 7 without a problem and my Linux boxes probably go more than 6 months!

I'd been getting well over 6 months from my Windows 7 desktop (which is too old to update to Windows 10) and years from my Linux systems - partly because by diligent troubleshooting, and a bit of research, you don't generally have to reboot (even if blindly doing so is easier).

Regular reboots on Windows 10 machines are enforced by Windows update anyway....Although it may not be a coincidence that my Windows 10 machine that gets the least use is the one with the problem.   Anyway, I'll report back here if my fix turns out to be the same or similar to your write up.   Thanks   IR

Appreciate hearing how you get on, hope my post does help. Took a little bit of time to figure out what was going on.

I had the exact same issue with an Area 51 R2.  I could not go 24 hours without hitting 98% used RAM.  Sometimes within 6 hours.  I finally did a full format and reinstall of Win 10.  The issue has not recurred.     I now have win 10 on a USB drive.  All the Dell downloads for my machine on another drive and rdy if it happens again.

Thanks for your comment, but I flat out do not accept a complete re-installation of Windows as a solution to this problem, when I already showed the solution in detail in my post. I'd be interested in whether the contents of my post would have helped you; it would certainly have been quicker than re-installing Windows.

Re-installing Windows may be necessary at times, but doing so for every little glitch or problem is madness and completely unacceptable IMHO. It is sad that the market expectations of OS performance is so incredibly low.

PCs should at this stage be more reliable than phones and tablets (and, generally, they are, when not running Windows).

Sorry for the long gap before updating on this. My problem could indeed be fixed with hindesite's suggestion of disabling the IP Helper service. When I first looked at the issue, the misbehaving svchost.exe process was increasing page file space (commit memory) at a steady rate of 200k per second.  For my setup which has a hard 16Gb limit on the page file (it's on its own partition to prevent file fragmentation), this equates to approximately 22 hours before all the page file was consumed.

I ran the laptop for a few days with the service disabled and the misbehaving svchost.exe process did not  continue consuming all the page file. Buoyed by the result I went a bit further and started updating drivers and software to see if I could permanently fix the problem....I started with the Dell update software, which has never run properly on my machine. That didn't fix it so I ran the update software to try to get everything up-to-date. The update service bought down a new bios, chipset driver and Dell foundations services. This still didn't fix it.

Since the IP Helper service is a network related service (allows tunneling of IPv6 through IPv4 in some fashion)  I thought I'd have a cracking at updating the Killer Network drivers. This has meant uninstalling the Dell certified ones and installing the latest drivers from Killer's website.  I've been meaning to do this for a while because the Dell issued drivers are getting pretty old now. Unfortunately this still didn't fix it.

So almost giving up, I thought I'd update the Nvidia drivers to the latest ones from Nvidia (same issue with old Dell drivers). Bizarrely this is the point that the problem went away. I don't know if it was just a combination of bad drivers that finally flushed through after installing the latest Nvidia drivers. I rebooted between each paragraph above so I know that it was the Nvidia drivers that caused the change but I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why.

I did all of this on 20th October and have seen no problems since then.  I've got the IP Helper service enabled again and since the 20th I've done a couple of windows updates and I think I updated lightroom. The problem with the page file does appear to be fixed.

I hope this is of some help to anyone else suffering from this problem...given the slightly odd solution I've held off reposting incase the problem returned.  Looking good at the moment though. I guess it's a shame Dell are so slow with their driver updates.  I also wonder if this problem hasn't been more widely recognised because not that many people have a top limit on or fixed size page file?

Thanks for the update, good to know my post was of some help despite the forum's less informed reaction to it.

I suspect that in general people don't have long uptimes on their systems, due to windows updates or just how they use them (and I see one comment that indicated very low expectations when it comes to uptimes anyway).

I've left IPHelper service not started, so I don't know if recent driver updates have fixed it (to my mind, the less running, the better, anyway) but for some reason my system has reverted back to the Dell Nvidia drivers so I'll need to run DDU before trying the Nvidia drivers again.

I'm happy with how things are going at the moment, so may not update for a while.

Thx for the heads up on IP Helper.  I'll fly out and assist u with The memory cleanup.. There's a special on Dyson Vacs.

Go to Network and Sharing Center in control panel and opt out of the homegroup. That should fix memory leak for now until problem is hopefully resolved by future windows updates.