[B3RGY]

My computer has some very odd RAM issues. For example, right now Task Manager displays 87% memory usage (8 gb). However only 10 items have more than 2% usage, and only one higher than 10% (System and compressed memory, at about 19%). When I change the display from percentage to values, System and compressed memory only used 360 mb of RAM. This adds up to less than 2gb of ram that I can use. It's not a Task Manager bug, because any time I try to play a game, I get kicked because I don't have enough RAM allocated to play it. My system recognized all 8 gb, but to make sure I checked the BIOS and all 8 are recognized there too. I have not overclocked this system at all. How do I fix this?

Edit: just checked the performance tab, it shows the following:

win10memoryprob.PNG 50k .PNG file

 

[billbartuska]

Windows Resource Montor will give you more/better information.

 

[Hyrox]

Windows 10 will reserve large amounts of memory that aren't necessarily in use by any application at any given time.

In the aforementioned resource monitor, you will see various columns detailing utilization, including Commit and Private. The values in the Private column are the ones relayed to you in each process's description in the Task Monitor. However, the overall % usage in the Task Monitor also includes all memory reserved for various purposes by the operating system itself (for example, the larger values in the Commit column).

The operating system makes these reservations to improve performance, and should an application ever actually need memory that has been reserved by the OS, but is not currently being used by that process, the OS will free it and transfer it to the hungry application.

Windows 10 is, for lack of a better word, memory hungry on paper due to these optimizations. Since you don't have much memory, those numbers don't look suspicious to me. As long as you take a look through task manager and don't see any unknown tasks, I'd say everything is probably behaving nicely.

On the other hand, should you actually ever reach 100% physical memory usage, you will almost certainly know immediately. Once you run out of memory, your computer essentially has to page data to and form hard drive disks directly, which is orders of magnitude slower than memory. The performance will likely be unbearably terrible.

 

[Pointy]

thats not normal. something is eating all your ram.

 

[B3RGY]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pointy

thats not normal. something is eating all your ram.

Thanks for the useful insight, I hadn't figured that out yet.

 

[B3RGY]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hyrox

Windows 10 will reserve large amounts of memory that aren't necessarily in use by any application at any given time.

In the aforementioned resource monitor, you will see various columns detailing utilization, including Commit and Private. The values in the Private column are the ones relayed to you in each process's description in the Task Monitor. However, the overall % usage in the Task Monitor also includes all memory reserved for various purposes by the operating system itself (for example, the larger values in the Commit column).

The operating system makes these reservations to improve performance, and should an application ever actually need memory that has been reserved by the OS, but is not currently being used by that process, the OS will free it and transfer it to the hungry application.

Windows 10 is, for lack of a better word, memory hungry on paper due to these optimizations. Since you don't have much memory, those numbers don't look suspicious to me. As long as you take a look through task manager and don't see any unknown tasks, I'd say everything is probably behaving nicely.

On the other hand, should you actually ever reach 100% physical memory usage, you will almost certainly know immediately. Once you run out of memory, your computer essentially has to page data to and form hard drive disks directly, which is orders of magnitude slower than memory. The performance will likely be unbearably terrible.

No, things aren't "behaving nicely". If you bothered to actually read my post, I have 8gb of ram (more than sufficient in case you were wondering). I did the math and task manager thinks I have less than 2gb. Again, if you took the time and read my post, you would know that I have reached 100% memory usage, and I most certainly did know it.