What's eating up all my ram?

[Sonikku]

Task manager indicates over 7 gigs is in use. Yet, barely 2 gigs seem to be in use by all total processes.

 

[Smoblikat]

Huh, thats weird. Disable your paging file, try booting in safe mode, do a virus scan, check for processes running under another user. The usual suspects.

 

[UsandThem]

Open up your resource monitor (click on bottom of your 2nd pic) and sort it by commit/working set by clicking on the column (high to low, or low to high). It will show you what is running.

 

[Sonikku]

I thought Task Manager was the resource monitor... Why did Microsoft make one within another one? Oh well. I appreciate the heads up on this, as it appears to be much more accurate than the dumbed down one in task manager.

 

[UsandThem]

I thought Task Manager was the resource monitor... Why did Microsoft make one within another one? Oh well. I appreciate the heads up on this, as it appears to be much more accurate than the dumbed down one in task manager.

Who knows. Microsoft has made some odd changes, and pretty well nuked most of the traditional control panel. I was just so used to being able to go to one spot for all of changes/programs/maintenance, so now it seems like I waste more time looking for where the setting is located than I do by actually changing anything.

Plus, the last Windows 10 update screwed up my shared printer settings that I had working perfectly fine since Windows 10 was released. Of course my wife and kids all needed to print stuff, so I am trying to figure out a way to make printer sharing stick. One step forward, two steps backwards

 

[VirtualLarry]

Actually, what's more of an issue is that you actually have 18.0GB "Committed", which is the overall amount of virtual memory used by user processes. So, you're not using 7.2GB, you're actually using 18.0GB, of which, 7.2GB is occupying physical RAM, the rest is living in the pagefile.

Edit: Oh, you have Avast and Chrome running, that basically explains it, I think.

Edit: Notice in the Task Manager shot for RAM usage, that it shows 4.7GB "Paged Pool", that's a type of system memory, that can also be used for storing PTEs (page-table entries). Those are used to map virtual memory. So, it looks like those, in additional to 2.3-2.5GB of application RAM, is what is using up your physical RAM. So that actually looks OK.

You just need to find out what's eating up your VM. Memory leak in something, like Chrome?

 

[ELopes580]

Is there any SSD disk caching software being used? I know Crucial's eats up ram like no tomorrow and not release it when I tried it out a while back.

 

[Sonikku]

I've never seen WoW gobble up so much ram. Someone explain to be the difference between commit and in use.

Before and after a system restart without WoW running.

after restart

 

[VirtualLarry]

New I've never seen WoW gobble up so much ram. Someone explain to be the difference between commit and in use.

It's kind of the difference, between virtual and physical RAM. "Commit charge", is the virtual-memory allocation total, generally-speaking. It has to live, either in the pagefile, or physical RAM. RAM usage is how much of that virtual-memory footprint, is currently living in Physical RAM. It can be paged out (moved from physical RAM to pagefile, or paged in, which loads memory from the pagefile to physical RAM).

 

[Torn Mind]

I think in hindsight, the common recommendation that "8GB of RAM is enough" that was pervasive in the Sandy Bridge/Haswell era was not one that had longevity (or Chrome) in mind.

32 GB minimum is a must for anyone wanting to use Chrome hard and then maybe fire up a game after a heavy browsing session.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think in hindsight, the common recommendation that "8GB of RAM is enough" that was pervasive in the Sandy Bridge/Haswell era was not one that had longevity (or Chrome) in mind.

32 GB minimum is a must for anyone wanting to use Chrome hard and then maybe fire up a game after a heavy browsing session.

The problem is, RAM prices are, relatively-speaking, through the roof right now. It was easy to recommend 16GB min., 32GB if power / heavy user, when RAM was available for $50 for a 16GB kit. Now that's it's $130 for 16GB of entry-level / off-brand RAM, and $150-180 for name-brand or faster stuff, it's very hard to recommend above 8GB, unless you truly NEED that much RAM.

I mean, yeah, 32GB is nice for heavy Chrome users, but there's always getting a decent SSD (SATA or PCI-E), and using it for the pagefile. It only slows you down a little bit, most of the time.

Laptops that only come with 4GB or 8GB of RAM pre-installed, and don't make it easy or in some cases, even possible, to upgrade, are the hardest-hit by this.

Edit: I did stock up, as much as I reasonably could, when RAM was 16GB for $50. Still have some 8GB DDR3 DIMMs available, but I'm basically out of DDR4, been doing more DDR4 builds, most of them 8GB (2x4GB). I paid ~$110 for an off-brand (actually, I think it was A-data, not quite off-brand, more like 2nd-tier) 16GB kit of 2133 a few weeks ago. All other brands and speeds were around $130 or more, that one happened to be on sale.

I also paid $112 ea., IIRC, for a couple of Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 for a pair of Ryzen rigs, unfortunately, they must have used off-brand / lesser-tier DRAM chips, because I couldn't get them to run faster than 2800, and even that wasn't 100% POST-stable. 2667 seemed to be.

 

[Sonikku]

The problem is, RAM prices are, relatively-speaking, through the roof right now. It was easy to recommend 16GB min., 32GB if power / heavy user, when RAM was available for $50 for a 16GB kit. Now that's it's $130 for 16GB of entry-level / off-brand RAM, and $150-180 for name-brand or faster stuff, it's very hard to recommend above 8GB, unless you truly NEED that much RAM.

I mean, yeah, 32GB is nice for heavy Chrome users, but there's always getting a decent SSD (SATA or PCI-E), and using it for the pagefile. It only slows you down a little bit, most of the time.

Laptops that only come with 4GB or 8GB of RAM pre-installed, and don't make it easy or in some cases, even possible, to upgrade, are the hardest-hit by this.

This is truth sadly. It's part of the reason why I don't even bother to take the considerable amount of time it would take to save up for a Ryzen 6 system system because even if I could afford the processor and motherboard, the ram is just too much of a kick to the teeth to swallow at the same time.

 

[VirtualLarry]

This is truth sadly. It's part of the reason why I don't even bother to take the considerable amount of time it would take to save up for a Ryzen 6 system system because even if I could afford the processor and motherboard, the ram is just too much of a kick to the teeth to swallow at the same time.

Too bad that they don't have these places that you can go, and pick up tech, because you just can't afford them. "Tech Pantry". Hmm. IDEA!

(only semi- /s )

I wonder how that would work. I guess, it would be mostly technology cast-offs, from those than can afford tech? "Tech Second Life"? (Probably get a C&D by the video-game developer / publisher on that one.)

Edit: I guess, they already have "tech recyclers" in many communities, which many people probably don't know about. There is or was one here, that I've been to, and purchased some things from.

It was pretty old stuff, though, like WRT54Gs, and 15-19in "square" LCDs. (They were starting to get in some widescreens, bought one of them for a friend.)

 

[Torn Mind]

The problem is, RAM prices are, relatively-speaking, through the roof right now. It was easy to recommend 16GB min., 32GB if power / heavy user, when RAM was available for $50 for a 16GB kit. Now that's it's $130 for 16GB of entry-level / off-brand RAM, and $150-180 for name-brand or faster stuff, it's very hard to recommend above 8GB, unless you truly NEED that much RAM.

I mean, yeah, 32GB is nice for heavy Chrome users, but there's always getting a decent SSD (SATA or PCI-E), and using it for the pagefile. It only slows you down a little bit, most of the time.

Laptops that only come with 4GB or 8GB of RAM pre-installed, and don't make it easy or in some cases, even possible, to upgrade, are the hardest-hit by this.

Edit: I did stock up, as much as I reasonably could, when RAM was 16GB for $50. Still have some 8GB DDR3 DIMMs available, but I'm basically out of DDR4, been doing more DDR4 builds, most of them 8GB (2x4GB). I paid ~$110 for an off-brand (actually, I think it was A-data, not quite off-brand, more like 2nd-tier) 16GB kit of 2133 a few weeks ago. All other brands and speeds were around $130 or more, that one happened to be on sale.

I also paid $112 ea., IIRC, for a couple of Team Vulcan DDR4-3000 for a pair of Ryzen rigs, unfortunately, they must have used off-brand / lesser-tier DRAM chips, because I couldn't get them to run faster than 2800, and even that wasn't 100% POST-stable. 2667 seemed to be.

I was referring to "back in the day". It's been years since I've closely followed this part of the forum, but 8GB recommendations were common back then.

 

[Ketchup]

Just to chime in, when I look at your first post, I don't see a problem. 4.8 GB of RAM is paged (not to be confused with the page file). So if you need more RAM, the paged area will dump to the page file, freeing up RAM for that application. Your post further down after restart is telling me that your computer had probably been running a while when you started the thread.

 

[Torn Mind]

Just to chime in, when I look at your first post, I don't see a problem. 4.8 GB of RAM is paged (not to be confused with the page file). So if you need more RAM, the paged area will dump to the page file, freeing up RAM for that application. Your post further down after restart is telling me that your computer had probably been running a while when you started the thread.

No. 18.0 GB of "memory" occupied total RAM, including physical and virtual memory. 7.2 GB of the 8GB contained in the sticks was filled up and the remaining 10.8 GB was in the pagefile.