Windows 10: Memory consumption with disk write, not released for other programs

Hello,
I got a nice shiny new 2 TB hard drive to go with my upgrade to Windows 10. Because I was so excited to have this, I left my computer on overnight downloading a ridiculous amount of games over Steam, dozens of GB. I woke to discover less than half of the operations were performed, and the system was hanged. I was hunting down a solution, and I happened to notice as I had resumed the download after rebooting that the memory usage was getting higher and higher. I have 16 GB so was quite startled to see 80% usage - seemed excessive, even with caching in effect. If Windows/Steam want to use as much memory as possible and actually use my 16 GB to help write data that's fair enough, but the issue I'm having is that it's not releasing the memory again later - other programs will lag and chug, and even if the download completes or Steam is exited, the memory consumption does not decrease - it is not released for use by other threads. Looking at the Task Manager right now, for example, less than a GB of mem usage is accounted for by processes or services, but I'm at 98%. On the performance tab, I have the following:

In use: 15.6 GB / Available, 290 MB / Committed 17.6/24.5 GB / Cached 194 MB / Paged Pool 231 MB / Non-paged Pool 14.3 GB

I have virtual memory on all three internal hard drives, set so that Windows can manage it. Looking at the resource monitor it shows the memory as:

Hardware Reserved 139 MB / In Use 15973 MB / Modified 13 MB / Standby 200 MB / Free 63 MB

Rebooting obviously clears the memory, and processes that consume it will release it as normal, making the memory available again. However, there seems to be a hole when it comes to these downloads, and I'm not sure if it's a Steam issue, a Windows issue, or some combination. I do know, however, that having downloads like this consume resources to the point that I'm at risk of hanging the system is not normal behavior, and I was wondering if anyone was familiar with the issue, knew of a workaround, that sort of thing.

Regards,
Ari

EDIT: Upon further experimentation it appears any significant amount of disk writing will do it - even large file transfers between drives will cause the memory to slowly increase. This leads me to believe Steam is not the culprit, but rather how Win10 currently handles memory in regards to disk writing. Again, my issue isn't that it does this, but rather that it's not releasing when complete and this can and will cause system slow-downs and hangups if it caps out. Thanks for reading and any advice you can offer!

:)

 

Memory consumption and release

I am using Windows Explorer to copy picture files (JPG and RAW) from my camera's memory cards to my hard disk. I have never had problems before but my computer (Windows 10) starts having performance problems and then freezes. Keyboard and mouse are unresponsive
and I have to do a hardware reset. I have started running Task Manager to watch for resource issues and noticed it is not CPU or disk bound but memory (24GB of real memory) slowly gets consumed and I guessing it runs out and hangs the system. The only thing
running is system processes and the WE which seems to not be releasing memory as it completes copying. Any ideas?

 

Memory consumption and release

Hi,

This issue may have been caused by a memory leak. It usually occurs when a process allocates memory from the paged or nonpaged pools, but it fails to release the memory when no longer needed. It affects the performance of applications and operating system.
We'd like to know if you've made any changes on your computer prior to the issue. Meanwhile, to help improve your computer's performance, you can check the tips listed on this
link.

Get back to us with the result.