Why is my RAM usage so high? (50%/4gb win8.1)

[Deleted]

With nothing running by my will (except chrome)

Windows 8.1 64 bit
4gb ram

[Lathais]

With nothing running by my will (except chrome)

Windows 8.1 64 bit
4gb ram

It's right there in the screen. BitDefender is your biggest culprit, followed by several Chrome Tabs. It's al listed right there exactly what is using the RAM.

Keep in mind, things will load stuff in to RAM and leave it there just in case it is needed again. Just because those things are loaded in to RAM does not mean they are being used at the moment. As soon as you need RAM for something, that stuff will go away. It really just looks like stuff from a half a dozen+ Chrome tabs being open though.

[Deleted]

First thing I thought when I seen the image was Dives from wipe club does Onyxia
"Chrome! Left Side! Many Chromes! Handle it!"

[Shadow Fox]

By chance is your Non-Paged Pool memory high under the Performance Tab -> Memory section?

[alzoron]

To be honest 2GB of RAM being used isn't really that high. 4GB total RAM is pretty much the low end these days. Even on a system with more RAM will show a higher usage than you would have seen 10 or so years ago. Modern programs and operating systems have been drifting towards the "If there's memory available, put it to use until something more important needs it" ideology.

[Alantor]

It's a known issue, i asked the same some time ago, when you sum up everything doesn't count 2gb because windows doesn't show how much it consumes (or shows it wrong or something like that, can't remember honestly). Bottom line, you should not worry and maybe install another 4gb :P

[Axelond]

4gb is nothing nowadays, I have no games open right now pretty much just chrome and some random stuff and I am at 6.3gb out of my 16gb RAM.

[Sunius]

It's a known issue, i asked the same some time ago, when you sum up everything doesn't count 2gb because windows doesn't show how much it consumes (or shows it wrong or something like that, can't remember honestly). Bottom line, you should not worry and maybe install another 4gb :P

It's not a matter of windows doesn't know how much it consumes... it's a matter of taskmgr.exe being unable to read kernel land memory, because it's a user land process. And that's totally normal. There are kernel level utilities for profiling memory usage, but average users can't really benefit from that.

[Cows For Life]

I have Steam, Skype, Media Player, and a browser with 20 tabs open (Windows 8.1) and I'm already at 2.8GB out of 8GB used. 2GB is nothing...

[JForny]

Had the same issue for a while... It is windows defender and windows auto updates. Disable windows defender and change windows update settings to manually from automatic.

[Sunius]

Had the same issue for a while... It is windows defender and windows auto updates. Disable windows defender and change windows update settings to manually from automatic.

That's bollocks...

First of all, neither consumes a significant amount of memory. Secondly, why would you want to disable automatic updates and the most unintrusive AV software ever?

[fixx]

Chrome's sandboxing eats crazy amounts of RAM. It's totally normal for it to use 100 megs per tab, so 20 open tabs would be 2GB RAM used.

If low memory is a problem, you need to switch to Firefox or IE

[Hellravager]

4gb is definitely too low for anything consider getting more ram like 8 or 16gb

[Deleted]

2GB ram used on 64bit is like clean windows just after boot these days. Nothing to worry about.

[JForny]

That's bollocks...

First of all, neither consumes a significant amount of memory. Secondly, why would you want to disable automatic updates and the most unintrusive AV software ever?

Google man... Don't attack me over what Microsoft themselves told people to do... Seriously... Why is everyone on this board such jerks? Attack others constantly and harass them?

[fixx]

Google man... Don't attack me over what Microsoft themselves told people to do... Seriously... Why is everyone on this board such jerks? Attack others constantly and harass them?

Because of blatant disinformation.

Googling for "windows automatic update ram" turned up few hits of memory leaks happening on XP and they didn't recommend turning it off, instead the solution was a known update to the Windows updater thingy to fix the leaks

Care to tell exactly what are you googling for when you find something relevant to Windows 8.1?

ps. "just google it" is bannable here btw, because it's a jerk answer :P

[Twoddle]

To be honest 2GB of RAM being used isn't really that high. 4GB total RAM is pretty much the low end these days. Even on a system with more RAM will show a higher usage than you would have seen 10 or so years ago. Modern programs and operating systems have been drifting towards the "If there's memory available, put it to use until something more important needs it" ideology.

Whatever caching system Windows uses it's incredibly inefficient. On my machine programs take an age to start up and even longer to shut down. Firing up Visual Studio takes almost as long as the machine takes to boot up and I'm not joking.

[SoulForge]

Whatever caching system Windows uses it's incredibly inefficient. On my machine programs take an age to start up and even longer to shut down. Firing up Visual Studio takes almost as long as the machine takes to boot up and I'm not joking.

Sounds like you have a bigger underlying issue than Windows itself.

[fixx]

Whatever caching system Windows uses it's incredibly inefficient. On my machine programs take an age to start up and even longer to shut down. Firing up Visual Studio takes almost as long as the machine takes to boot up and I'm not joking.

It's totally normal that Visual Studio takes ages to start because it's million small files. VS will not fit into Superfetch cache so it will never be preloaded, and disc caching in general doesn't help much with million small files unless you have defragmented the drive.

Get an SSD to speed up things, and if you use VS daily your compile times will be longer than VS start times anyway.

[schwarzkopf]

Chrome

I had Chrome using 25GB of my 32GB a few weeks ago, it has become a real hog.