Suggestions to lower Memory/Ram usage?

grimofdoom · 03 Aug 2015

My mac air(early 2014) only has 4gb of ram, and this cannot be changed ( Apple is very stingy on this for the ram is pre-soldered in and costs a high $100 for the extra 4gb of ram before purchase). Right now, with nothing opened up, 30% is being used up.

I have increased cores from 1 to 4, changed the visual effects to best performance, maximized ram usage/ virtual memory. No changes to the memory usage, staying at 30%. I did consult the windows hep desk about Cortana can take up from 20mb-80mb at a constant change AFTER being fully disabled(rarely once, i saw it jump up to ~500mb.( currently Cortana is part of the core and cannot be truly disabled... for now).

(I have steam and Avast, which also takes a small bit of the memory)

Does anyone else have any suggestion on how I can improve perfomance and lower the ram usage?

cluberti · 03 Aug 2015

It would help to know where the memory is being consumed - can you post a screenshot of what you see on the "Memory" tab in resmon (sort by "Working Set")? Currently RAMMap doesn't work on Windows 10 just yet, so we'll have to make due with resmon until RAMMap gets an update.

grimofdoom · 03 Aug 2015

Suggestions to lower Memory/Ram usage?-untitled.png

Here is my task manager with nothing else running.

cluberti · 03 Aug 2015

That would be task manager - I asked for a screenshot from ResMon, specifically the "Memory" tab.

Task Manager is not a good starting point for certain consumption patterns, and memory is one of them. Use ResMon instead.

batlhilz · 03 Aug 2015

i think its the way of windows 10 uses and preserves memory, i have the same "problem" - however its not truly in use, its just reserved by windows for its background processes and stuff?

grimofdoom · 03 Aug 2015

cluberti · 03 Aug 2015

That's actually not bad - it is indeed memory in use, but well within the minimum requirements for Windows 10. Here's what my machine looks like running Windows 10 this evening:

Suggestions to lower Memory/Ram usage?-win10memory.png

If you wanted to reduce the load, you'd want to start by disabling things like Cortana (SearchUI.exe), and disabling services and scheduled tasks. You'd probably not get more than 100MB or so by doing it, but if you can stand to live without those features you should be OK to do so at your discretion. I make ZERO claims, positive or negative, about the following page, but if you want to translate it it's getting some play around the interwebs right now:
Windows 10 super-debloating guide

grimofdoom · 03 Aug 2015

From my talks with the Microsoft's live help. Cortana is part of the core and will just continue to restart itself. I tried to end the task 'searchUI', but it comes back on like nothing ever happened.

Nus · 03 Aug 2015

Makes you wonder how we managed to scrape by with 8MB RAM in Win 95, lol...

grimofdoom said:

From my talks with the Microsoft's live help. Cortana is part of the core and will just continue to restart itself. I tried to end the task 'searchUI', but it comes back on like nothing ever happened.

You can stop Cortana running with the rename folder hack.

mkdr · 03 Aug 2015

What are you even talking about o_0 April 1st? Troll post? 34% USAGE is an incredible good value for Windows & 4GB... Windows 8.1 used about 44% after clean boot. Unbelievable... Also Windows will try to adapt if you have less ram, to about always stay around 40-50%, even if you have 2gb or 1gb after boot.