On a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro laptop, 8GB RAM, Intel Core i7, running Windows 8.1 I'm seeing the following. In situations of high system load (high CPU/memory usage), the System process starts using high CPU in addition to the CPU already used by other processes. This has been happening for at least a year.  Examples of the situations when this happens:   Many Google Chrome tabs open with the Developer Tools open for some of them A Virtualbox virtual machine with 2-3GB RAM doing some heavy lifting on top of the usual browsers, background apps A Java application using 1GB of RAM, 3GB of virtual memory using 100% of one CPU core on top of the usual browsers, background apps   The irony of the situation is that when the system is already under heavy load, the System using more CPUs causes even more of a slowdown.  Using Process Explorer I've been able to pinpoint the thread within System that uses high CPU to be ntoskrnl.exe!KeRegisterBugCheckReasonCallback. This is a function that should be called by drivers when a BSOD is happening (). However in my case no BSOD happens.  The issue occurs even with no USB devices attached, so none of those can be the cause.  I've done a WPA trace when the issue occurred as explained in , screenshot below. This doesn't tell me much more than resources are used within ntoskrnl.exe with the nearest driver in the trail being fltmgr.sys. That doesn't help me a lot because it's not a specific driver that I can uninstall or upgrade.  Any pointers to further debug this are welcome!  Process Explorer for the System process while the issue is happening:      WPA trace:
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I have noticed that from some time my system is freezing and its probably caused by the high CPU usage which is caused by the system process.  All applications I'm running is the Skype, TeamSpeak and Chrome so it definitely shouldnt eat that amount of CPU.  You can see the problem itself and running processes in the screenshot below:    Sometimes CPU usage is reaching 90%, but the average usage is like 40-65%.  My PC parameters:   Windows 8 (customer preview) Intel Core i3 - 2350M 8 GB RAM   I'd appreciate any help attempt! Regards.  --UPDATE--  As the user below posted a great answer, I have noticed that the process that is eating the most CPU in the system is called Arthurx.sys, simple google tells that it's a TPLink driver (an wifi adapter, I have bought like 2 weeks ago!) drivers has been installed from the Windows MSDN, but also tried to install the drivers from the attached CD, but it doesn't help. From the system start, it is using like 5% of the CPU only, but after 2-4 hours of working it is growing up and reaching 40-60% of the CPU usage.  Device name: TPLink WN722N
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I have been feeling this way for a while, looking at task manager mentally ballparking how much physical memory should be in use, and noticing a large disparity. I finally got around to measuring it. Taking the results of tasklist and adding, gave about 3.87 GB. Task manager told me I was using 4.6 GB of memory. This seems like a large disparity. Where did it go?  EDIT: So its clear, it is not going to prefetch. It has also been suggested that its part of the OS, but not part of any of the system processes. If this is true, please find a way to get the OS to tell me how much memory is getting used. Since I want to find out where the memory went, asking me to look at the difference does nothing for me.  EDIT 2: It is not the following:   The kernel The cache Hardware reserved memory   Picture of resources taken up. Not quite sure what it will do but...
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I found a similar question but still it doesn't answer my questions     First off, considering user processes don't have access to this part and I guess if they try to access it, it would lead to an error, then why even include this part in the user process virtual space?  Can you guys give me a real life scenario of this part being essential and useful?  Also, one more question is I always thought the kernel part of memory is dynamic, meaning it might grow for example when we use dynamic libraries in our programs, so is it true? If so, then how can the OS determine how big the size of kernel is in the virtual space of our processes? And when our kernel in physical memory grows or changes, does the same effect happens in the kernel part of virtual memory for all the processes? Is the mapping of this virtual kernel to real kernel a one to one mapping?
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Since I upgraded from Ubuntu 16 to 18.04, CPU usage is high. Sometimes 100% cpu usage, and when that happens we can't do anything. If we check on the process systemd-udevd, we find it is using 100% CPU. I have followed an answer to this question:  but now I can't use any browser.  I ran the command sudo mv /lib/udev/rules.d/71-nvidia.rules ~ and now I can't install a new browser or use the old one, and I still have this 100% CPU issue.     Note: I have installed Mint 19 version and found the same issue. I just downgraded to Mint 18.3 and CPU and memory usage are fine. Many others also reported the same issue.
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I developed an algorithm for a fairly hard problem in mathematics which is likely to need several months to finish. As I have limited resources only, I started this on my Ubuntu 12.04 (x86) laptop. Now I want to install some updates and actually restart the laptop (the "please reboot" message is just annoying).  Is there a way to save an entire process including its allocated memory for continuation beyond a reboot?  Here is some information about the process you might need. Please feel free to ask for further information if needed.   I called the process in a terminal with the command "./binary &gt; ./somefile &amp;" or "time ./binary > ./somefile &amp;", I cannot really remember. It's printing some debug information to std::cerr (not very often). It's currently using roughly 600.0 kiB and even though this will increase, it's unlikely to increase rapidly. the process runs with normal priority the kernel is 3.2.0-26-generic-pae, the cpu is an AMD, the operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 x86. it runs since 9 days and 14 hours (so too long to cancel it ;-) )
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I am using a linux server which has 128GB of memory and 24 cores. I use top to see how much it is used. Its output is pasted at the end of the post. Here are two questions:  (1) I see that each of the running processes occupies a very small percentage of memory (%MEM no more than 0.2%, and most just 0.0%), but how the total memory is almost used as in the fourth line of output ("Mem:  130766620k total, 130161072k used,   605548k free,   919300k buffers")? The sum of used percentage of memory over all processes seems unlikely to achieve almost 100%, doesn't it?  (2) how to understand the load average on the first line ("load average: 14.04, 14.02, 14.00")?   Thanks and regards!  Edit:  Thanks!  I also really like to hear some rough numbers based on used percentage of memory to determine if a server is heavily loaded, since I once became the one who cramed the server without understanding the current load.  Is swap regarded as almost the same as memory? For example, when memory and swap are almost of same size, if the memory is almost running out but the swap is still largely free, may I just view it as if the used percentage of memory + swap is still not high and run other new processes?  How would you consider together CPU or memory (or memory + swap) usage? Do you become worried if either of them reaches too high or both?  Output of top：  $ top    top - 12:45:33 up 19 days, 23:11, 18 users,  load average: 14.04, 14.02, 14.00 Tasks: 484 total,  12 running, 472 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie Cpu(s): 36.7%us, 19.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 43.6%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st Mem:  130766620k total, 130161072k used,   605548k free,   919300k buffers Swap: 63111312k total,   500556k used, 62610756k free, 124437752k cached    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND  6529 sanchez   18  -2 1075m 219m  13m S  100  0.2  13760:23 MATLAB 13210 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1216 R  100  0.0   3:56.75 absurdity 13888 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1204 R  100  0.0   2:04.89 absurdity 14542 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1196 R  100  0.0   1:08.34 absurdity 14544 timothy   18  -2  2888 2076  400 R  100  0.0   1:06.14 gatherData  6183 sanchez   18  -2 1133m 195m  13m S  100  0.2  13676:04 MATLAB  6795 sanchez   18  -2 1079m 210m  13m S  100  0.2  13734:26 MATLAB 10178 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1204 R  100  0.0  11:33.93 absurdity  12438 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1216 R  100  0.0   5:38.17 absurdity 13661 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1216 R  100  0.0   2:44.13 absurdity 14098 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1204 R  100  0.0   1:58.31 absurdity 14335 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1196 R  100  0.0   1:08.93 absurdity 14765 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1196 R   99  0.0   0:32.57 absurdity 13445 timothy   18  -2 48336  37m 1216 R   99  0.0   3:01.37 absurdity 28990 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    2  0.0  65:50.21 pdflush 12141 tim       18  -2 19380 1660 1024 R    1  0.0   0:04.04 top  1240 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0  16:07.11 kjournald  9019 root      20   0  296m 4460 2616 S    0  0.0  82:19.51 kdm_greet     1 root      20   0  4028  728  592 S    0  0.0   0:03.11 init     2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd     3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.01 migration/0     4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:08.13 ksoftirqd/0     5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0     6 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0  17:27.31 migration/1     7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:01.21 ksoftirqd/1     8 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/1     9 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0  10:02.56 migration/2    10 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.34 ksoftirqd/2    11 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/2    12 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   4:29.53 migration/3    13 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.34 ksoftirqd/3
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I think I'm being the victim of a bug here. Sometimes while I'm working (I still don't know why), my network traffic goes up to 200 KB/s and stays that way, even tough I'm not doing anything internet-related.   This sometimes happens to me with the CPU usage. When it does, I just run a top command to find out which process is responsible and then kill it. Problem is: I have no way of knowing which process is responsible for my high network usage. Both the resource monitor and the top command only tell me my total network usage, neither of them tells me process specific network info.  I've found questions here about monitoring total bandwidth usage, but, as I mentioned, that's not what I need. Is there another command I can use to find out which process is getting out of hand?  The command iftop gives results that disagree entirely with the information reported by System Monitor. While the latter claims there's high network traffic, the former claims there's barely 1 KB/s.  I've already tried killing all the obvious ones (Firefox, update-manager, Pidgin, etc) with no luck. So far, restarting the machine is the only way I found of getting rid of the issue.
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I've scoured the web, but I'm sick of reading "scan your computer for viruses" and "upgrade your RAM" on answers to similar questions to this. I understand that dwm.exe is for (simply put) caching bitmaps for things like Aero-peek and similar, but as far as I have read it shouldn't be using vast amounts of memory.  My colleague and I both have 4GB of RAM, Core 2 Duo, blah, blah -- essentially they're pretty capable. His dwm.exe is running at around 30mb, mine is currently running at about half a gig, though it does fluctuate quite a lot. This is the same while running the exact same applications (currently Zend studio, FireFox (with firemin - low memory usage), Outlook). Every so often I will get a notification asking me if I want to switch to Aero Basic because it's using too much memory, and sometimes it will just switch itself to basic and let me know why.  I know it's possible to stop it switching, but I want to know why it is using too much memory otherwise it's just papering over the cracks.  One thing to add is this seems to have started after a robbery on Monday, where two of my monitors were stolen, and I had to temporarily use a couple of alternative monitors. I am now using brand new monitors but the problem is the same. All drivers installed and working seemingly fine.  Any ideas why the usage is so high?  We are using windows 7 64-bit Professional.
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I have a problem that my windows 7 computer sometimes starts accessing the disk like crazy for maybe 10 minutes at a time. The process in question is the "system" process. I have disabled superfetch and hibernation on my computer, if that makes any difference. I disabled those to see if they were the cause of the problems, but no change. I have 6 GB of RAM and only the web browser was started when I took the screenshot, so I don't think it was thrashing due to page faults.  Any ideas on how to find the cause of this?
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I have noticed on several Windows 7 machines that Windows updates and Windows driver search can cause svchost.exe to consume excessive amount of RAM.  In the case of Windows updates, it seems that all the updates get downloaded to RAM, cached, and then you experience the joy of installing them while the machine is operational, and again at reboot.  I have these machines set to never download, update, or notify the user of updates, because svchost.exe, TrustedInstaller.exe, and wau...exe all go haywire under any other setting.  svchost.exe will still consume the massive amounts of RAM under any of other the options for Windows updates.  Therefore, I now manually check and install updates once a week.  in the case of Windows driver search, when you plug in a new device, Windows will consume an excessive amount of RAM while it's probing, analyzing, and downloading a driver for the device.  The most prominent example is when I attempted to connect a 3TB drive to a machine.  My laptop was not able to connect to the device.  It was a Core i7 with 4GB of RAM.  I plugged the drive into a desktop with 16GB of RAM.  I don't recall if this machine had crazy RAM usage trying to cess out the drive.  However, the laptop got an upgrade to 12GB of RAM, so I connected the drive to it.  RAM usage for svchost spiked to 3GB.  I've seen similar, but not as extreme, behavior almost any time I plug in a new device.  These machines are all Core i7s of some variety with 12GB of RAM and up.  Not light specs, though maybe that's only average for 2015?  I have researched this phenomenon before, and while I have found many people asking similar questions, I have not found solutions to the problem.  Is there a way to mitigate this behavior?  Relevant links:
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lead me to be quite shocked with my current system. The CPU in my workstation is an i7 with hyperthreading enabled, and cat /proc/cpuinfo produces 4 'cpu's.  That all given, my PC can generate over a 16 in all the load average slots from 1 minute to 15 minutes while compiling packages for Gentoo, but still be working perfectly for all other tasks as well. I've even seen it as high as 24, though it was starting to slow down at that point. How does this work, if 1.0 is supposed to represent one core at full utilisation?
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I have just turned on my PC and have two applications running; Thunderbird and Firefox. Whatever else is running is part of Ubuntu's feature set (as well as a few indicators).  This has been ongoing for weeks, so I'm not sure if it's normal behaviour or not.  Right now, my memory usage indicator says that Ubuntu is using 41% of my 6GB of RAM. I haven't even opened Gimp or my other day-to-day things. I'll be buying another 6GB of RAM, this week, so that I don't run out when using Gimp or Openshot, for example.  An overview of my running applications shows that Nautilus is using the most, yet it isn't even open. This seems a little excessive, or am I missing something?
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I searched a lot about this online and couldn't find a solution, I turned off fast startup as many answers have suggested. But it didn't work ,  The problem happened after I connected a secondary hard drive to my laptop removing the dvd drive , whenever I remove the secondary hard drive , above processes act normal. I have a SSD as my primary drive , the problem happens only when the secondary drive is connected , I desperately need a solution since this is killing my computer.
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This System Information is from Process Explorer. There is still physical memory available but the system shows nearly no RAM left.  Task Manager also shows that about 74% of total RAM is used.  Since installing Windows 8.1, the computer had 4+8=12 GB of RAM. I upgraded it by changing the 4 GB to an 8 GB module. Could that be the problem? Or is this behavior normal and I've just misunderstood the meaning of available physical memory?
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I have noticed this on many different Windows machine, on many different occasions: the RAM usage reported by Task Manager or Resource Monitor often seems to add up to an amount which is significantly lower than the actual amount in use.  For example, many times on my laptop or my desktop, I have seen something like 7GB in use, and yet the total of the Working RAM Set is more like 3GB. I just can't figure out where it's being used!  Here's an extreme example I noticed today in Resource Monitor on a server:    If you right-click the image and open in a new tab, and view the numbers, you'll notice that the Working Set (which doesn't include nonphysical virtual memory) add up to about 1.7GB. I get similar numbers by adding up RAM usage in Task Manager when "Show processes from all users" is enabled.  Now here's a screenshot of task manager's Performance tab:    This says 7.6GB of physical memory is in use.  I see this all the time, on personal computers, laptops, and now servers: the total RAM usage reported by system tools only accounts for about 1/4 of the RAM usage I observe. WTF is going on???  Is there any satisfying explanation of where all my RAM is? What is gobbling it up, and why is it leaving no trace?  EDIT: Here's a picture of the graphical RAM use, as user whs asked for:    EDIT 2: In response to James' response, here's a picture of the nonpaged processes in poolmon.exe, sorted by size:    These results confuse me. poolmon correctly states that I have 6GB of nonpaged pool in use, but all the nonpaged pool processes are less than 8MB in size.  What could this mean? Is poolmon failing to detect some of the processes using the nonpaged pool?
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I was using my MacBook Pro (with 16GB of RAM) as usual and out of blue I've this popup that:  Your system has run out of application memory. To avoid problems with your computer, quit any applications you are not using.   I've obviously closed few which I could, but it didn't help. After checking on memory, it seems kernel task ate 7GB and 22.36GB swap memory was used of total 23GB (which obviously was the case). However I've still 20GB of space free on my SDD.  Activity Monitor didn't help much whilst my OS X was heading to the destruction.    My top stats before my kernel freeze: Processes: 344 total, 2 running, 5 stuck, 337 sleeping, 2580 threads                                                                                                                         19:23:56 Load Avg: 1.56, 1.62, 2.09  CPU usage: 3.51% user, 8.47% sys, 88.1% idle   SharedLibs: 46M resident, 0B data, 6572K linkedit. MemRegions: 757970 total, 2139M resident, 56M private, 907M shared. PhysMem: 9410M used (6198M wired), 556M unused. VM: 1155G vsize, 1311M framework vsize, 112872658(320) swapins, 122668389(0) swapouts. Networks: packets: 299419263/363G in, 142126838/14G out. Disks: 58970173/1079G read, 20012389/1120G written.  At the end my OS X frozen and I had to do hard reset, repair my SDD in recovery mode and fixing afterwards (recovering lost work, fixing application conflicts, checking my lost+found folder, Chrome/Terminal tabs gone, headache, etc.). My question is, how do I check on high memory usage of kernel task or how to properly deal with that kind of situation? I've tried to take Sample with Activity Monitor, but it's greyed out.  My MacBook Pro details: 2.3GHz Intel Core i7 (late 2013) with 16GB RAM. OS X: 10.9.5
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Ubuntu has been crashing on me recently. I think its because it runs out of memory so I ran the free -m command and found that my memory usage was really high. So then, i ran top to find the culprit, but the displayed processes were using less than 1.5% of memory. How do I know which program is making ubuntu crash/run out of memory? Below is the output:  shafee@shafee-pc:~$ free -m              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached Mem:          3824       3714        110          0        978       1954 -/+ buffers/cache:        780       3044 Swap:           99          0         99  shafee@shafee-pc:~$ top top - 02:12:14 up  1:24,  2 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.42, 1.49 Tasks: 182 total,   1 running, 181 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie Cpu(s):  2.9%us,  1.9%sy,  0.3%ni, 79.3%id, 15.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.2%si,  0.0%st Mem:   3916708k total,  3803848k used,   112860k free,  1002308k buffers Swap:   102396k total,        0k used,   102396k free,  2001852k cached    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND              4200 root      20   0  289m  53m  38m S    2  1.4   1:06.45 Xorg                 5590 shafee    20   0 19348 1368  956 R    2  0.0   0:00.01 top                     1 root      20   0 24124 2136 1264 S    0  0.1   0:02.05 init                    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd                3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:24.23 ksoftirqd/0             6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0             7 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1             9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.11 ksoftirqd/1            11 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/2            13 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:03.89 ksoftirqd/2            14 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/3            16 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.16 ksoftirqd/3            17 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 cpuset                 18 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper                19 root       0 -20     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 netns                  21 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 sync_supers         shafee@shafee-pc:~$   Or is it normal to have 110mb of free memory and is my issue related to something else?