Disabling "System and compressed memory" (ntoskrnl.exe)

Question

I am very exhausted by this. This program is destroying my computer. I have an ASUS G750 series laptop, which has 16gbs of RAM and a haswell i7 inside it. It is just a year old. I upgraded from Windows 8.1 to 10 in august of 2015, and have used it without too much problems for months. Then a couple of weeks ago this happened. My computer is constantly lagging, audio is glitching when I play music or video, games lag too. First I thought it is because of a bad habit I have, which is never turning off my computer. I always hibernate(sleep) it, or just leave it open for long amounts of time. I restart it once in a week or so. I usually have too many tabs open in chrome, so I am either too lazy to check all of them or they are just too important to be closed at the moment. Anyway. Yesterday I managed to finish all my work and close all the tabs, then restarted my computer. After the boot I went to youtube and started playing a video, then the audio and video glitched again. I opened the task manager and saw "System and compressed memory" on top of the list. I guess whenever I do something tasking on the CPU, it starts to work. I have observed a pattern in its behaviour. It is like a parrot. I performed a scan with my antivirus today, while keeping task manager open and and the update rate set to high. I saw that its disk usage is in synch with antivirus, just 1 second behind. This happens with everything else. It copies the behavior of the program that uses the most resources. I am too worried that it will wear out my beloved SSD, besides the lag and stuff. I have tried lots of ways to turn it off, disable it, or delete it through registry and services, but no avail. From what I have learned through forums, this process tries to compress what is in my memory. At the peak point of my memory usage (which is when I play GTA V) I use 8-9gbs of RAM, and that is just a few hours of gameplay, most of the time it sits at 6gbs max (and that is just because of the amount of tabs open in Chrome). So, where is the need here for the compression ? The hell, let it use all 16gbs, I want it. But no, as soon as I do something - anything at all - it starts riding my computer like a horse. So I am asking, please, someone help me. Is there ANY way, to end this program's existence, while keeping my OS ? Thanks in advance.

Solution

When analyzing the file, I can see that the CPU usage comes from the driver ignis.sys, which is part of Bitdefender AV suite

Line #, DPC/ISR, Process, Stack Tag, Stack, Count, TimeStamp, % Weight
50, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- tcpip.sys!TcpTcbReceive, 37859, , 11,86
51, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- tcpip.sys!InetInspectReceiveTcpDatagram, 37713, , 11,82
52, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- tcpip.sys!WfpTlShimInspectRecvTcpDatagram, 37709, , 11,82
53, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- NETIO.SYS!KfdClassify, 37684, , 11,81
54, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- NETIO.SYS!ArbitrateAndEnforce, 37675, , 11,80
55, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- NETIO.SYS!ProcessCallout, 37666, , 11,80
56, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- ignis.sys!?, 37660, , 11,80
57, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- ignis.sys!?, 37655, , 11,80
58, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- ignis.sys!?, 35814, , 11,22
59, , , ,   |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |- ignis.sys!?<itself>, 30047, , 9,42

Update or remove Bitdefender.

Comments

[Ching]

I also want to note that I have turned the paging file off, as I think there is no need for it, and I thought it was the cause. I have also disabled Runtime Broker and Superfetch.

[DavidPostill]

Possible duplicate of Windows 10, 'System' process taking massive amounts of RAM

[Ching]

Hey david, I have done their solution (disabling Superfetch). It is not working in my case. In my case, it uses compression for anything.

[magicandre1981]

Install the WPT (part of the Win10 SDK: dev.windows.com/en-us/downloads/windows-10-sdk), run WPRUI.exe, select First Level, CPU Usage, Resident Analysis and click to start and next click on Save (capture 30s of the audio glitches). Zip the large ETL file into zip/RAR file, upload the zip (OneDrive, dropbox, google drive) and post the share link here.

[fixer1234]

That's quite a wall of text. You will get a better response of you do some basic formatting, break it into paragraphs, etc. Many readers don't want to wade into this kind of post.

[Ramhound]

"I am too worried that it will wear out my beloved SSD" - Considering everything is happening in system memory, this isn't possible, its not possible to disable memory compression feature of the memory mangement in Windows 10.

[Jamie Hanrahan]

"System and compressed memory" is the new edition of the "System" process from previous versions. "Compressed memory" is another function that's been added into it. But this process runs threads from many, many kernel components, including device drivers. You need to follow magicandre1981's advice to figure out (or let someone else figure out) exactly what the culprit is. In several cases reported here lately the problem has been a network driver. It is almost certainly not the "compressed memory" aspect.

[Ching]

@magicandre1981 , the issue didn't occurr for a few days. that's why I wasn't able to record it. Today it occurred again and I recorded it. Here is the link to the *.etl file : drive.google.com/file/d/0B4oU1nF7Yf0hSUxadVBCeWZ0aFk/… Thanks for taking your time to analyze my problem.

[Ching]

@Ramhound , I am worried because it shows Disk usage in Task manager. I wouldn't be, if it was just memory usage. I hope we will be able to find the cause of this problem.

[magicandre1981]

ok, I posted what I saw from the trace.

[Ching]

Thank you very much for all of your effort, my friend. I gues I will be deleting it, as there are no updates available. What antivirus do you recommend ?

[magicandre1981]

I use NOD32. Try some Trial/Free Edtions and look which AV you like