Memory leak in Windows 8.1 with Killer E2200 and Windows Network Data Usage Monitoring
Recently upgraded to a new computer with Intel’s latest Haswell generation and Microsoft Windows 8.1. Although its performance has been stellar, a few days ago unexpectedly ran into severely degraded performance.
Saw in the Task Manager that all available memory was taken up by the Non-Paged Pool. After a system reboot the memory used by the Non-Paged Pool quickly started to increase until all memory was taken.
Looked up what information could fine online about memory leaks in Windows 8.1 and came upon this forum post in which others detailed similar experiences when using Windows 8 on hardware equipped with Qualcomm’s Killer ethernet networking products.
The actual cause of the memory leak seems to be the Windows Network Data Usage Monitoring Driver service which in combination with a Killer network driver starts to fill up the Non-Paged Pool memory.
Considering that my MSI H87-G43 Gaming motherboard is equipped with the Killer Ethernet E2200 and am using the Killer Network Manager driver, knew it had to be the same cause.
Applied the suggested fix of altering the registry key value of the “Start” entry to 4 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu\ to disable the Windows Network Data Usage Monitor Driver from starting and after a reboot the issue seems properly solved!
Blue Blue Wave 
Another thing: If you’re having problems with the key not saving after restart, right click on the NDU folder, click Permissions, Advanced, then, near the top, click on the change button by owner. On the windows that comes up, type your MICROSOFT ACCOUNT EMAIL into the box (click check names if you really want to) and apply everything. Thanks for the help BTW.
That worked, thanks a lot!!!!!
What do you have to do when you are at start from ndu? you don’t explain that
@sylvester rep
Change the value of the the registry key “Start” in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Ndu to 4 (like in the screenshot).
I edited the text to make it more clear.
I fkn love you. Been trying to fix this for ages.. thought my SSD was broken or something.
You are quite literally my savior right now, +1 to everything you do!
thank you sooo much man !!
i was wondering why my ram usage was at 7gb when my pc was just 2 days old lol
Dude, I’m following the step that you mentioned. But inversely my non-paged pool memory is increasing after I disabled it ! LOL this is ridiculous. Anyone have the same problem as I am ?
@rizkimezo
If you have the same symptom that your non-paged pool was increasing on Windows 8 (or 8.1) with a Qualcomm’s Killer ethernet or related networking product, then the above fix should solve it. You did reboot after changing the registry value, right?
I’m not quite sure whether it caused by the same problem that you have or not. Yes I did all steps that you described. this is weird haha
@rizkimezo
Another device driver could be the culprit, from what I read online, others experience similar symptoms but caused by drivers for other device drivers than Qualcomm’s Killer ethernet devices. 😦
wow, thank a lot. I’m amost going to reinstall windows and everyting because this problem.
mines already set to 4 and im still having this issue ive tried updating my ethernet drivers and it bugs never goes through still says im on the old version computer keeps crashing from this problem idk what to do anymore have tried everything
@chase chapman
That does sound like the driver could be the culprit then, or perhaps another device or service is filling up the non-paged memory?
THANK YOU!!! I even recently updated to Windows10 and the problem carried over but after looking at your advice I think I can fix the problem now since it appears to be the same cause.
I did the change owner thing so it stayed fixed after a restart and I also did the fix. But after a few days of it being fixed it suddenly jumped to %50 memory use. My non paged pool is not as high as 600mb (which used all my memory). But it is 400 on start-up and I only have 4 gigs left (%50 used). Would getting more RAM sticks fix it. I have already ordered more (to upgrade to 16 gigs) cause I want to.
So I managed to get it back down. But is their a way to stop it from getting back down again? I have done the owner thing. Also I just kept redoing the fix till it worked.
@Tazwin
Could perhaps be another driver causing the non-paged memory pool to fill up or something else eating up your free RAM?
Ok, thanks.
Also Smithy. Do you know of a way that I can find which driver is causing this problem? I have Poolmon and I have used it but I do not know how to use it.
@Tazwin
There’s DriverView from NirSoft but I don’t think it shows the actual memory consumption.
Maybe VMMap? it’s a Windows Sysinternals application available on Microsoft technet.
This literally saved my life bro. 😀
Thx a lot this rly helped me out, you deserve a cookie, or ten
Thx Thx!
thk, really helpful !!!
HOLY F*** I have had this issue for months thank you for the fix I would give you money if I saw the guy that figured this out.
Yep this definitely works. Had this memory leak problem on Windows 8.1 Pro x64, and now again on Windows 10 Pro x64. Disabling the ndu.sys worked. Thanks for this !
Ran into this problem for the first time on Windows 10. Perhaps it’s been there before, but it’s only just now shown up after starting to use Steam in home streaming.
I removed the Killer specific drivers and software and used Qualcomm 8161 drivers. This appeared to solve the problem, but it didn’t. However, it did dramatically reduce the problem.
So it’s possible there are three issues:
1. There’s a memory leak in the crummy E2200 Killer software suite.
2. There’s a memory leak caused by the firmware… I don’t know if this is possible.
3. The Killer NICs are shit.
#3 is a fact.
I’m going to give this solution a try, but I’m pretty sick of this NIC. I’ve used a lot of network cards over the years, and this is by far the worst. I’m tempted to just go out and buy an Intel card today and be done with it.
@Chris
Personally wasn’t impressed with this NIC or MSI’s H87-G43 Gaming motherboard. I’ve since switched back to Asus with an Intel NIC.
@Smithy
I have an ASRock Z87 Killer. It’s actually been a really good board. No complaints, except for the NIC. I’d definitely recommend these boards overall, but it gets harder to recommend
My old college roommate bought an MSI board, probably similar to yours, for the 4th Gen Core processors. I remember helping him out a bit and looking at the BIOS. Typical of MSI, it was riddled with typos and spelling mistakes and had a terrible GUI. (When I used to work retail, my intro to MSI was a laptop with several spelling mistakes on the retail box and 3 spelling mistakes on the MSI sticker advertising product features/specs. The killer being these were mistakes that word spellcheck would pick up.)
As far as I know, the board has been stable, but I don’t think it would kill MSI to hire someone with an English degree and/or someone who specializes in UX design.
Now I’m ranting… 🙂 Thanks for the post. I’m finally getting around to trying it tonight.
THANKS ! I bought brand new MSI laptop, memory usage was at 99% after 5 minutes of doing anything on the pc, so yeah it was cause by the Killer network software. The solution presented at the top helped but not as much, so I got rid of the whole Killer Suite and installed only necessary drivers. Everything is now working just fine.
Hiho!
I know its an old article, but im suffering the same problem on win10 home. What i did: Deleted killer driver and app, installed driver only
Edit that regedit value to 4. It seems something editing it back to 2 from time to time and i cant reveal what causing it.
I tried above registry solution, but once it came down by that, but again nonpagedpool memory usage increased. I recently updated my all drivers, i dont know what to do
I solved the memory leak thanks to u
ありがとう
mannnnnnnnnnnnn it’s been weeks since i had this insane memory leak. i fucking love u
Shouldn’t you recommend that users look at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Ndu as ControlSet001 may not be the active copy of the registry depending on their circumstances?
Works for Windows 10 as well. Thank you!!!
many thanks to you ! win 10 – okay !
This is fucking awesome, thank you !!!
Seems to have done the trick, you sir are awesome. Thank you!
Killer E2201 LAN chip
have this on my mobo, and suggested method fixed the memory issue. Win 10 btw
It’s sad it’s now 2017 and this still is a problem, but omg thank you so much for sharing a solution to this! 🙂
Hi, I’m having the same rapid fill up of the non paged pool and so changed the registry entry from 2 to 4 (the second location mentioned in the thread was already on 4). They both are still on 4 after a restart but I’m still getting the same non paged pool error. I don’t have any Killer drivers (or Spotify or third party antivirus software – other common causes according to the forums). I had just been promoted to do the Creators update, which makes me suspicious it is something to do with that. Anybody got any ideas? Thanks
Muchas gracias, Thank you
@Joel
Sounds like another driver or process may be the cause of filling up the Non-Paged Pool. Perhaps it’s an idea to install and use Microsoft’s Windows Performance Toolkit to try and sniff out the actual culprit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/test/wpt/
thanks @smithy, I am only a regular user so can’t use the toolkit. We tried lots of things but a windows reinstall (without Creators update) has solved it.
Wow… Ive had this problem for ages .. It got worse recently around the same time i upgraded my internet connection to much faster speeds… Today i was downloading on steam 64 GB file and i opened task manager and i was actually watching my ram fill up .. Like as fast as my new internet was downloading,,. lol I was about to do a full clean windows install and thought id do one last search “i had tried a heap of things but nothing worked..”
Thank you!
You saved me man. This worked with Windows 10 after the Fall Creators update started this happening.
also back here to do it again after the fall creator update reverted this change. thanks again for this info.
This is still a problem with the e2200 Killer network driver on my MSI 990FXA board running Windows 10. Seriously, why won’t they fix it – this is not that new of a board? anyway … the reg hack worked just fine, my nonpaged pool is now sitting at 339MB and stead while downloading instead of the 7GB it was before.
Yep, went from 78% total memory usage to 27% after bootup. Used Rammap64.exe to reveal the non-paged pool taking up 10GB of my 16GM RAM. New-ish computer (March 2017). Thank you!
Looks like it works ^^ ive changed the regedit this morning and it had work well all the day (it usualy got filled my 16 GB 2 times per day). Hope this is the definitive solution TY.
Well I have 16 Gb of ram and I had the same issue… at least for now it doesn’t seem to have such a problem… thank you a lot!!!
why i cant find on regedit?? i have e2200 killer anyway. anyone like me??
OMG! Thanks for this, solved my problem with Windows 10. Brilliant! Killer network crap.
Woah! Thanks alot man, from 2021!