Possible fix for memory leak while downloading

[gabeblackbeard]

I'm creating a new topic for this because I think it might be bad form to necro another topic on this subject seeing as they all seem to be from 2015, and creating a new one might make it easier for people to find this possible fix.

I've recently formatted my PC and installed Windows 7 on it. I then noticed that while downloading anything off Steam (and only during that), my RAM usage would slowly and steadily rise until none was left. The task manager didn't report the Steam process as eating all that memory up, but I noticed the "memory used by kernel"->"non paged" section, under the Performance tab, would also increase during the download, until it reached the thousands by the time all my RAM was gone.

Stopping the download or restarting Steam did not bring the RAM back (and also didn't decrease the number described by the "non paged" section). Restarting the computer was necessary to free the memory up.

The culprit, I've found out, was my Avast antivirus. I experimented with disabling/enabling it several times and, every single time it was enabled, the "non paged" pool started increasing and the available memory started decreasing. Every time Avast was disabled, that whole memory decreasing process would stop.

I haven't, at the time of this posting, reinstalled Avast or tried a different antivirus at all, but I will eventually and I'll update this topic if anything different happens. I used AVG before formatting and I can say I didn't have this problem back then so it might be a problem exclusive to my installation of Avast or with Avast itself.

Either way, to all the people who have had this problem in the past months and still haven't found a solution, try disabling your antivirus software during a Steam download and see if that fixes things.

[Rosa Pistol]

I had the same problem and i fixed it by uninstalling killer network manager, qualcomm network manager and just installed the base drivers