If you have memory leak...

empleat · 05 Feb 2021

I was searching for this answer years

While it possibly wasn't memory leak at all. But memory compression. Everyone thought it was memory leak, when your free RAM is filled with standby memory. Your application crashes saying: there is no memory. When there is no free RAM left, Windows tries to compress memory to create space. This supposedly causing your applications to crash.

Fix: How to enable memory compression Windows 10 - Super User

You have to disable memory compression. I tested it on BF4, have 1MB RAM free, while using no page file and it doesn't crash. I had this disabled by default. Interesting, it was still issue in Windows 10. But they possibly turned that off. Which caused the problem...

What an annoying issue, everyone had problems with this years. And it turns out, all Microsoft had to do was: to turn off memory compression.

You should not turn this off, if you have 8GB, or less of RAM! Or you PC possibly crashes, or BSOD!!!

steve108 · 07 Feb 2021

Hello empleat

,
So how exactly did disabling memory compression improve your PC performance? What changes did you notice with it disabled vs enabled?

empleat · 08 Feb 2021

steve108 said:

Hello empleat

,
So how exactly did disabling memory compression improve your PC performance? What changes did you notice with it disabled vs enabled?

Improve performance??? It is not about improving performance, or at least not primarily. I was talking about memory leak. It is a widespread issue. Unless maybe you have 128GB RAM+ All free memory is filled with a standby memory, which itself is fine. Everyone thought that problem was, that memory wasn't released and games crashed with notice like: you don't have enough memory! So everyone thought it was a memory leak, because all memory is filled with a standby memory and it looked like - it was never released. It actually might be memory compression. I read post on superuser. And for instance: when there is not enough free memory left - Windows tries to compress existing memory, which causes problems from programs and they crash! It was disabled on default on 20H2. But probably wasn't before, as I had crashes without page file.

Even today, SSDs have greater lifespan, that it probably won't affect you. Page file is buggy and you should use same amount as your RAM! And if you use encryption, it adds some overhead. Or if you clean page file at shutdown, it creates huge write. Also there are unnecessary writes to a disk. Probably consuming some CPU cycles, or cause DPC latency dunno. God forbid something needs to be loaded from disk, it will cause stutters possibly. There should be no need to use page file on modern computers...

Disabling this should allow you to disable page file. I had currently no problems in Battlefield 4. While all RAM was full, previously game would crash after being filled with standby memory without a pagefile.

steve108 · 08 Feb 2021

empleat said:

Improve performance??? It is not about improving performance, or at least not primarily. I was talking about memory leak. It is a widespread issue. Unless maybe you have 128GB RAM+ All free memory is filled with a standby memory, which itself is fine. Everyone thought that problem was, that memory wasn't released and games crashed with notice like: you don't have enough memory! So everyone thought it was a memory leak, because all memory is filled with a standby memory and it looked like - it was never released. It actually might be memory compression. I read post on superuser. And for instance: when there is not enough free memory left - Windows tries to compress existing memory, which causes problems from programs and they crash! It was disabled on default on 20H2. But probably wasn't before, as I had crashes without page file.

Even today, SSDs have greater lifespan, that it probably won't affect you. Page file is buggy and you should use same amount as your RAM! And if you use encryption, it adds some overhead. Or if you clean page file at shutdown, it creates huge write. Also there are unnecessary writes to a disk. Probably consuming some CPU cycles, or cause DPC latency dunno. God forbid something needs to be loaded from disk, it will cause stutters possibly. There should be no need to use page file on modern computers...

Disabling this should allow you to disable page file. I had currently no problems in Battlefield 4. While all RAM was full, previously game would crash after being filled with standby memory without a pagefile.

Disabling paging file is total BS unless you have a ridiculously large amount of RAM - which I don't . There something very wrong with your PC if this is a solution you prescribe. Please don't tell others to do this - for God's sake.

I wouldn't even do this with 16 GB of RAM.

steve108 · 08 Feb 2021

"If you have memory leak..." you need to find the offensive app or driver.

steve108 · 08 Feb 2021

And I should add that I've tried disabling the paging file within the last year and apps stared crashing - and this was with 16 GB RAM and an i7.

empleat · 12 Feb 2021

steve108 said:

"If you have memory leak..." you need to find the offensive app or driver.

Oh no... I have seen great deal of answers like this to this problem. It is completely something else... Read again

It is not memory leak, but everyone knows this under name "memory leak". Because it seemed like one, from memory not being released and then program crashing complaining about no memory!!! But it is memory compression, which is causing the crashes!