A technician is investigating a Windows 11 workstation that experiences severe performance degradation after running automated data processing tasks for several hours. In Task Manager, the technician notices that available physical memory steadily decreases to near zero, while non-paged pool memory continuously accumulates and remains unreleased even after the processing application is terminated. Which of the following is the most likely cause of these symptoms?
- An application or driver memory leakAnswer
- BAn under-provisioned virtual memory page file
- CCorrupted Component Store system files requiring DISM repair
- DMisconfigured User Account Control elevation permissions
Answer
An application or driver memory leak
The correct answer identifies an application or driver memory leak. Memory leaks occur when a software process or kernel-mode driver requests memory allocation from the operating system but neglects to release it after completing the operation. Because non-paged pool memory resides strictly in physical RAM and cannot be paged to disk, a leak in this pool causes overall available RAM to diminish steadily until the computer is restarted or the faulty driver is reloaded.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Identifying Memory Leaks in Windows Performance Monitoring
Estimated Time:1m 30s