Weird RAM issues - TTLG Forums

Azaran on 4/5/2021 at 04:19

As of late I've been randomly getting warnings that my pc ran out of memory (I have 16 GB). I discovered that the culprit appeared to be Chrome, which is a memory hog - the couple times this happened I had a ton of tabs open.

The thing is, when I close Chrome and kill any background processes in Task manager, my usage doesn't go down as expected. On reboot, my machine starts off using 3.9 - 4.2 GB, and when I open just one Chrome window it shoots to 7-8 GB, and will not go back under 7 GB even after I kill Chrome. Task manager isn't much help; it shows svchost as consuming the most memory, but it makes no sense, even all the processes added up don't account for those extra 3 GB of RAM that are being used up. What the hell is going on? Is there some invisible background process I should know about?

Inline Image:

https://i.postimg.cc/g2yPZNJ9/a7a648b38e4cbf75114ef32c7bcd4c45.png

LeatherMan on 4/5/2021 at 17:31

Under the Processes tab, be sure to click Show processes from all users. It is likely that Chrome continues to run in the background as a service, but (https://www.groovypost.com/howto/stop-google-chrome-from-running-in-the-background/) that can be disabled.

As for why Chrome uses ~4GB with only one tab I cannot help with that.

Azaran on 4/5/2021 at 21:05

Thanks. I did a bit more digging, clicked svchost, and found out the culprit is Windows update stealthily running in the background. I disabled the service, and everything's back to normal. Not sure why Chrome was triggering it though