Windows 8.1: Constant 'Low Memory' warnings with 5GB of free memory

If you read earlier in the thread it was proposed that it was an Intel graphics driver issue.  At runtime programs can be instructed as to which set of drivers/which chipset they are to use.  Typically there's a graphics chip on the mainboard (Intel HD in my case) and an optional dedicated GPU (Nvidia 650M in my case).  So when I say "run on" I'm not referring to the code which the CPU processes, I'm referring to the code that the GPU handles.

Of course it has to do with intel .. Or amd...

programs don't run on the gpu. Even cuda programs like boinc, run on the CPU and use the gpu

so no.. It's utterly impossible for you programs to be running on nvidia anything. 

You you also can't run out of video memory.. If your card has 1gb gddr5 video ram, and a game needs 3, it will use 2gb of system memory... In THIS case if you have a bad card.. Bad driver, etc, it can leak memory (video memory) which then spills into system memory... This data is LOCKED and can not be paged. In a case like this, you'd get out of memory errors once all your system memory was filled up by overflow video memory,.. All the pagefiles in the world won't help here...but there us a limit. On 32bit systems only 2GB of system ram can be used by the gpu drivers if the card lacks ram.. On 64bit systems, this number us much higher... Around 16gb....

if you keep getting corrupt profiles, shut down all write caching on the HDs ... Win 8/8.1 loves to corrupt hd data when using write back cache. If u have raid software, set cache to read only and buffer flush enabled. In windows, go to computer management, drive management and right click each drive....NOT A PARTITION... properties.... Then policy tab...

make sure the bottom box is NOT Checked...checking it disables buffer flushing on the hd itself and win 8/8.1 will often shutdown and kill power to the HDs with data still in their buffer. Un checking that should help. Better yet.. Uncheck the top write cache box. This way data is written, un buffered... See if that stops your corruption... You'll take a nasty write speed hit. But it is better than corruption

This also has nothing to do with Intel.  The Nvidia GPU monitor on my system shows the programs running are doing so via Nvidia not Intel.  I'd check to see if it's still happening on the latest version of 8.1 but unfortunately my Windows 8 user profile is corrupt for the 4th time in 15 months and I don't feel like wiping my entire drive to fix it.

The pagefile system has NOTHING to do with the extra ram use or the out of memory errors... the only time the pagefiles come into play with those warning is if you exhaust physical + pagefile...

A bandaid fix would be to make a total of 16 or 32gb page files...

Chances are you have a memory leak in a driver.

follow here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2012/07/31/troubleshooting-pool-leaks-part-1-perfmon.aspx

and

here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2012/08/30/troubleshooting-pool-leaks-part-2-poolmon.aspx

and you can find out EXACTLY what's leaking memory.

Windows 8.1 has a kernel bug .. open up task manager.. then resource monitor from the performance tab.. sort by WORKING set

WORKING SET is memory that is NOT paged... and is sitting in physical memory

Private set is actually a VERY poor measurement of the memory a program uses... you want to look at working set and COMMIT

Commit is the total VIRTUAL memory the application has requested to use

In some weird cases , working set can be higher that commit... it just means that app wants to keep it's memory non paged... you can also go to the group policy editor and make sure NO accounts.. including the SYSTEM account has the permission to LOCK PAGES IN MEMORY..... if so.. your physical ram will fill up like mad and the pagefiles barely touched.