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Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 10:55 am
by Tofucube
Windows 10 has been giving me some alerts recently that certain programs, specifically games, are using too much memory and windows suggests they be closed.  This is really annoying since it will boot me out of whatever i'm doing to tell me. It seems to happen when the program hits the 2 gig mark of memory usage.  However, I have 8 gigs and the overall memory usage will still only be around 6 gigs.  Is this something that can be disabled or changed or am i really at threat of running out of memory and I should just upgrade my ram?

thanks

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 11:10 am
by Neutronbeam
Kept getting something like that on my wife's Win 10 laptop, but I had outfitted it with 12GB RAM so memory should not be an issue. Looked at the boot / start up list and disabled Adobe Reader and several Apple programs and uninstalled some stuff--Dropbox was on there for some reason and I didn't install it and she wouldn't be using it. All seems well now.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 11:27 am
by trieste1s
Did you tweak your virtual memory values, especially by restricting its amount?

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 11:46 am
by Tofucube
Neutronbeam wrote:
Kept getting something like that on my wife's Win 10 laptop, but I had outfitted it with 12GB RAM so memory should not be an issue. Looked at the boot / start up list and disabled Adobe Reader and several Apple programs and uninstalled some stuff--Dropbox was on there for some reason and I didn't install it and she wouldn't be using it. All seems well now.

I'll try cleaning up some of the background programs again and disabling the startup programs.  I'll see if that helps.

trieste1s wrote:
Did you tweak your virtual memory values, especially by restricting its amount?

I'm pretty sure i didn't restrict its amount but i can google how to check into that and look into it just to be sure.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:43 pm
by TwistedKestrel
Can you give a general description of the system you're using? Kinda curious about this problem, have never seen it myself. Are you using a 32 bit version of Windows 10?

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:48 pm
by Aether
Did you make any hardware or OS changes recently? I ran into this message intermittently (and some other problems) when I upgraded a Core i5 2500K from Win 8 to Win 10. It turns out that Win 10 does not officially support the integrated HD3000 graphics. The OS would run OK, but I would have odd problems like this. When I installed a supported graphics card, the problems went away. While you probably do not have this exact same issue, I wanted to mention it because apparently you can get this message from a seemingly unrelated problem.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:58 pm
by Tofucube
TwistedKestrel wrote:
Can you give a general description of the system you're using? Kinda curious about this problem, have never seen it myself. Are you using a 32 bit version of Windows 10?

Sure
i5-3470
P8Z77-V LK
8 gigs ddr3 ram
120 gig SSD
1 terabyte HDD
GTX 970

Aether wrote:
Did you make any hardware or OS changes recently? I ran into this message intermittently (and some other problems) when I upgraded a Core i5 2500K from Win 8 to Win 10. It turns out that Win 10 does not officially support the integrated HD3000 graphics. The OS would run OK, but I would have odd problems like this. When I installed a supported graphics card, the problems went away. While you probably do not have this exact same issue, I wanted to mention it because apparently you can get this message from a seemingly unrelated problem.

No, the last time i made any hardware changes was when I put in the 970 a little over a year ago.  As for windows 10 i haven't done much recently with it since it got autoupgraded from 7 however long ago that happened. 

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:18 pm
by Aether
"It seems to happen when the program hits the 2 gig mark of memory usage."

Is this a 32-bit program? I have a recollection that a 32-bit programs can only access 2 GB of memory on a 32-bit OS, but I don't know if this is true or not on a 64-bit OS.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:21 pm
by Aether
I found the answer to my question at:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6395 ... ing-system

"You've got the same basic restriction when running a 32bit process under Win64. Your app runs in a 32 but subsystem which does its best to look like Win32, and this will include the memory restrictions for your process (lower 2GB for you, upper 2GB for the OS)"

If your program is 32-bit, then that's probably your answer. 

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:24 pm
by Vhalidictes
trieste1s wrote:
Did you tweak your virtual memory values, especially by restricting its amount?

Every time I've had those messages, it's because Windows couldn't automatically increase the page file.

Looking at the bigger picture, this really shouldn't happen regularly unless other programs are using a lot of RAM. A good example is a memory leak in addons, or a Browser itself if there are a lot of tabs open. 

Next time this happens, go into Task Manager and check to see what services are using a lot of memory.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 2:40 pm
by Aether
What specific programs are doing this?

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 3:30 pm
by UberGerbil
Aether wrote:
I found the answer to my question at:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6395 ... ing-system

"You've got the same basic restriction when running a 32bit process under Win64. Your app runs in a 32 but subsystem which does its best to look like Win32, and this will include the memory restrictions for your process (lower 2GB for you, upper 2GB for the OS)"

If your program is 32-bit, then that's probably your answer. 

There is one caveat to that: if the 32bit program is marked as Large Address Aware, it will get 4GB of virtual address space when running on a 64bit OS (or 3GB when running on a 32bit OS with the /3GB switch, but let's ignore obsolete OSes, k?). This is a linker option (ie, it's something that should be set by the developer when compiling the program); however, t's actually possible to patch the header of a 32bit application so it is marked as LAA -- and there was a time when people were doing this with some success for some games. However, the program may have been written under assumption it will never see more than 2GB of VAS and so will crash when it does. That's bad program design, but it happens, so YMMV. 

Not that that has anything to do with this particular problem, but just FYI. 

If the program is 32bit, it certainly can exhaust its virtual address space, and that will happen at the 2GB mark. Note that an application that does a lot of allocation and freeing can end up with its memory space badly fragmented, to the point where it can't allocate the memory it needs even though it should be able to. Most programs don't handle a failed memory allocation very gracefully. Exhaustion of the system virtual memory (physical memory + page file) is a possibility also, particularly if the page file has been "tweaked" so it won't grow, as a couple of folks have noted. There are other, more obscure resources that can be exhausted and might be reported this way by Windows, but those are increasingly unlikely as recent versions of Windows have removed those even for 32bit programs.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 4:33 pm
by blahsaysblah
Ive been having similar issues. Have 32 GB RAM and usually more than half of memory is free when it happens. Seems to be a bug in Windows update or latest Nvidia driver, not sure which.

Seems more like a specific structure needs to get bigger and is denied either to some limit being lowered or bad math/code or a legitimate leak of some data structure/resource.

edit: to be clear, having the problem with 64-bit processes.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 4:41 pm
by Tofucube
Aether wrote:
I found the answer to my question at:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6395 ... ing-system

"You've got the same basic restriction when running a 32bit process under Win64. Your app runs in a 32 but subsystem which does its best to look like Win32, and this will include the memory restrictions for your process (lower 2GB for you, upper 2GB for the OS)"

If your program is 32-bit, then that's probably your answer. 

Aether wrote:
What specific programs are doing this?

Specifically i've been running into this with Overwatch, which, unless google is lying to me, should only be a 64 bit program.  So that shouldn't be the issue.  It did come up with another game but i cant remember off the top of my head what game it was.  I'll try clearing out more of the background programs and see what happens if there is less overall ram usage happening next time. 

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 5:44 pm
by Aether
Out of curiosity, I Googled "overwatch memory leak", and multiple hits came up. It's possible that this is an issue with the game.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 12:01 am
by Waco
Ha, I remember patching Morrowind for large address support back when the original view distance mods came out. Spending hours and hours tweaking settings to generate usable distance terrain that wouldn't tank frame rates. Good times. :)

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 11:10 am
by Tofucube
Thanks for the suggestions!

I've adjusted my page file size and cleaned out some background programs. We'll see if this work going forward.

Re: Windows Memory Alerts

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 12:02 pm
by wharris1
Had exact same problem running fully patched Windows 10 64 bit usually while running Diablo. Became more and more frequent and started doing other non-specific hang-ups. Problem was a memory stick that finally gave out after around 5 years. Was running 8 GB of DDR3 on my Z67 with 2600K stock. Popped in new pair (now 16 GB) and all is well. Now realize I could have run a mem-test prior to buying new memory; not sure why I didn't but seems like an easy way to see if your hardware is part of the problem.

Good luck