FFS How do I turn off this low memory warning or tune Win 10 mem mgmt?

SOHO1 · 07 Aug 2016

Here I am, at the end of one of my greatest game battles, ready to change screens and collect accolades in LoL when I get a popup from Windows saying it wants to close the game due to low memory conditions, OK or CANCEL? OMFG CANCEL! But Nooooooooooooooo, it closes the game client anyway! "Burn in hell", Microsoft, is what I'm, screaming, but that's just a historical footnote, and does not help define the true nature of this request - how to reconfigure this god forsaken new memory management feature.

Now, parameters wise, I understand that Windows 10 can run in as little as 2 GB of RAM, and if you need more memory than is physically available, isn't it the job of the OS to swap something out and make room? Indeed the gaming client is less than 1/2 GB and there are plenty of Chrome windows not in use which can be swapped out, and whilst I can certainly close down every non-gaming window before starting my game, isn't that what the OS is supposed to manage for us?

Now, I could understand if the system slowed down swapping out all the unused applications, though it only needs to swap out enough for the current application to function, but really, I have 16 GB of RAM in addition to video memory on the video adapter, and the memory monitor says I have only used about 15 of it. WAIT - think about that. There's 14 GB of apps that either this crappy Win10 OS is saying I need to manually manage because it can't or 14 GB of idle applications that could all be swapped out instead of my freaking 0.5 (half) GB game client.

So, browsing around the web and this forum it seems there is something mysterious called a commit limit, which can be exceeded (under what conditions and to what effect and with what configurable parameters, including hardware, another 16GB to bring to 32 GB perhaps?) I don't know how to manage. Somewhere tears are being shed that Windows might actually need 32 GB because 16 GB don't seem to be enough, or the OS has had a complete lobotomy and does not know how to keep a small active process in memory and swap out gigs and gigs of potential other processes sitting around doing nothing.

So, I get it, an upgrade back to Windows 7 is a strong possibility, but if someone can explain a tweak not to throw me under the bus when my physical memory reaches it's last GB, that would be helpful. This has got to be the worst feature Microsoft has ever come up with and killing my small active game code segment as a choice over unused browser windows or that horrid boring Office doc in the background, just seems to me to be throwing down the gauntlet.

*FFS - COULD mean Freedom For Some (as opposed to slavery for others?)
*LoL - League of Legends
*OMFG - COULD mean I have a favorite.
*hell - any one, seven, or more, depending on your favorite depiction.
*forsaken - pretty sure all religions and atheists can agree god did not upgrade to windows 10

blaze007 · 08 Aug 2016

did you change your page file from the default setting? i would always get low system memory warning when firefox was using over 2gb of ram when i had a page file of 1gb but once i increased my page file to 2gb the problem went away. i have 16gb of ram.

LMiller7 · 08 Aug 2016

I have always disliked that out of memory notification because it is so vague about what it means. Most people would think this refers to a shortage of RAM but that is rarely the case. RAM shortages rarely cause any problems other than poor performance. More often it is due to the commit charge hitting the commit limit. The commit charge is a difficult concept to understand and I will not attempt to describe it here. The commit limit is RAM size + pagefile size minus a small overhead. But even without a pagefile that would give you a commit limit of 16 GB which is unlikely to be exceeded under normal circumstances.

Is the game 32 or 64 bit? A 32 bit process is usually limited to a 2 GB virtual address space no matter how much RAM you have. With modern games that 2 GB can be very confining with some rather nasty results if it is reached. Using a 64 bit OS may actually contribute to the problem. There really isn't much you can do if that is the problem.

Edit: Turning off the warning, even if this were possible, is hardly likely to help matters. The problem that prompted the warning would still remain.