# Extremely high Kernel Memory Usage



## jasonwc (Oct 6, 2009)

I just installed Windows 7 Professional x64 on a new system I built last week and I'm seeing extremely high kernel memory usage for no apparent reason. Kernel paged memory jumps from 150-200 MB to 700-800 MB, and in some cases over 2000 MB. 

I had the same issue on a 2 year-old HP laptop, so there must be some factor causing the issue on both machines. Here are the specs of the two systems-

Desktop- (Just built the system last week from parts purchased on Newegg)
Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.8 Ghz (Quad Core, Hyper-Threaded Lynnfield)
Gigabyte GB-P55-UD3R Motherboard (1156 socket)
4GB DDR3 1600 @ 7-7-7-24 OCZ Platinum
MSI Nvidia 9600GT 1 GB GDDR3
1 TB 7200RPM Western Digital Caviar Black Hard Drive
22x Samsung DVD-RW (SATA)
Zonet ZEW1642 802.11n

Laptop- HP DV9500CTO
Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2.0 Ghz
4 GB DDR2 800 (upgraded)
Nvidia 8400M GS 128 MB
320 GB 7200RPM Hitachi Hard Drive (upgraded)
8x DVD-RW

Both systems were running Windows 7 x64 (Ultimate and Professional) and exhibited the same high kernel paged memory usage. 

Commonly used software-
Firefox 3.5.x
Thunderbird 3 Beta 4
Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (latest build)
Itunes 9
Pidgin 2.5.8
KeePass 2.0.9









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## lawrence.cook (Jun 19, 2008)

could be superfetch? not sure if you know already what that is, but it supposedly preloads some apps into memory to allow for quicker loading later on, which could be why your seeing this increase.


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## jasonwc (Oct 6, 2009)

Superfetch only should show up in the "cached" category. Cached memory doesn't reduce the amount of available memory, and it wouldn't effect kernel memory usage.

I think the problem is likely a memory leak in a low-level driver. I installed the latest 191.07 Nvidia driver, and my kernel memory usage is lower so far.


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## jasonwc (Oct 6, 2009)

The issue was in fact due to a bug in the Nvidia driver. Updating to the 191.07 Win 7 x64 driver fixed the issue. (came out after my post)

I had a similar issue where Windows could not kill hung iTunes processes, and thus could not restart, shutdown, or sleep successfully. This problem was also the fault of a low-level driver. Updating to the latest Realtek audio driver fixed the issue.


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