When does ram usage increase?

I have an HP pavilion dv7 laptop that I've increased the ram from 4G to 8G, now running win10-64. Ram usage is 25%.... 2G used out of 8G. I dont think I've ever seen it increase much. Mostly used for internet, email and microcontroller c compiling . CPU is 2 cores, 2G clock. Have a 466G drive 7200 rpm, 8M cache. Is there some registry tweak to use more ram for disk cache? Like there is for swap file size? Next speedemup tweak might be bigger drive with more cache? Is there a ramdisk benchmark that would show improved compile speed after applying tweaks? I have read many msgs in the forum about trying to minimize ram use for whatever misguided purpose, so here I am trying to tell the os to use more if it will speed some things up. Thanks.

What do you see in Task Manager performance tab?



Here I have 8GB, 4.8GB is in use, 2.6GB cached (not in use but waiting in case it is needed) and only 463MB is free. Windows will use cache to hold programs/data if it doesn't need it for anything else. If you are seeing cached (called "Standby" if you hover your mouse over it in Task Manager) then your RAM is being used.

Perhaps you could upload a picture of this screen...

Whether second guessing Windows memory management by forcing specific things into RAM would be an advantage I don't know. You would need to know better than Windows what was required, load it manually and then this RAM would be unavailable for other purposes.

Windows is using more memory than you think. The memory gauge doesn't show full memory usage. It was never meant to. If it did the value would be very high on most systems most of the time and that would be neither interesting or useful.

To see full memory usage you need to look at Resource Monitor, in particular the values for "Free" and "Standby". All memory not labeled as Free is in use in some way. Standby memory (very large, as it should be, on most systems) is very much in use. It serves as a type of system wide cache and is a major contributor to good performance. And like free memory it is also available to any application that needs it. It is not a contradiction that memory can be both in use and available.

In most cases Windows does a very good job of managing memory. This was true in the early days of the NT platform and is even more true today.

RAM drives are usually a poor use of memory. Modern operating systems have a sophisticated caching system that provides most of the benefits with fewer problems. They may improve some aspect of performance but it will cost you elsewhere.

Memory management in any modern OS is very complex and difficult to understand, and very easy to have misconceptions about. I am a firm believer in letting the OS manage memory as it wishes. In the vast majority of cases it will do a far better job than you could hope to do yourself. People who think otherwise are only fooling themselves.

To see full memory usage you need to look at Resource Monitor, in particular the values for "Free" and "Standby". All memory not labeled as Free is in use in some way. Standby memory (very large, as it should be, on most systems) is very much in use.

Learned something new. Just browsing, with few very light apps inactive running in background: 16GB, free ram 376MB.

I suspect you may have a "memory leak" from some driver or application.

I wasn't complaining. I've never needed to click on the Memory tab in Resource Monitor. Not with underused 16GB RAM.