Today’s Windows 8.1 Preview bug report has us on an issue that is causing high usage of RAM on some computers that have installed the public preview version of the operating system.
The likely culprit is a memory leak of sorts in the system process.
According to users who have reported the bug on Microsoft’s support forums, the problem is most probably caused by incompatible device drivers — meaning it is up to the manufacturers to address this issue by the time the final version of Windows 8.1 goes live.
One user explained this, saying:
“Apparently this is related to a driver issue since I got a BSOD for nvlddmkm.sys when memory was almost all used up. I installed the older non-Windows 8.1 Preview drivers and the memory issue is gone. So that is good for now as long as I don’t want to use and GPU goodness.”
Microsoft is gearing up to launch the RTM version of Windows 8.1 around the middle of August.
The software titan is currently working on ironing out any and all bugs that are reported by end users, as well as hardware and software partners. At the same time, the company is working with hardware vendors to sort out the driver issues — which essentially are the cause of a number of reported bugs.
All Comments
I noticed that some apps continue to use some RAM after you close them but I figured that’s just so that when you run them again, they’ll start up faster.
I think I’ve found the culprit. In Process Explorer, I noticed that the virtual size of one of the svchost process was extremely high. (4 GB!) I checked which services were associated with the process and disabled them one by one. After disabling SuperFetch, the virtual size of the process dropped significantly to about 55 MB. After a reboot and a bit of uptime, the problem seems to be gone.
tl;dr: Disable SuperFetch until the issue is addressed if you’re getting a memory leak.
Disregard this, that wasn’t what was causing the problem.