How is this memory usage even possible?

Hi,

How is it possible that I have 88% memory usage with no programs running?



I thought it could be caused by memory leaks, but after a fresh boot it is the same.

This an 8 GB machine, how can "nothing" occupy 88%?

This has been happening periodically with this machine (check my profile for details on the machine).

This specific time (when I took the screenshot) an admin has launched the disk defragmenter but not the other times. May this be caused by periodic runs of defragmenter eating all machine's mem?

Needless to say, this can take hours during which applications like Fireofox, Chrome, Outlook, etc. stop responding for several seconds. Also, machine iresponsiveness renders the machine unusable (a click can take 1 min to produce any effect).

Thanks for any hints.

João M. S. Silva

There are programs running......what is the system guard program? try to minimise programs running in the background.

farrellart said:

There are programs running......what is the system guard program? try to minimise programs running in the background.

Probably Traps or GlobalProtect, which I can't disable. But the top program is occupying like 1% of the RAM.

First, I just want to point some misunderstandings that are common when talking about Windows memory management. Windows manages memory dynamically and it is perfectly normal to sometimes see a significant amount of memory in use when the system is basically loafing along doing nothing. Windows sees a large amount of free memory as a wasted resource and will latch onto large chucks of it to perform its background tasks more efficiently. If something else comes along that requires more memory, Windows should readily relinquish memory that it does not need. It is only if you are really maxing out on memory usage unexpectedly and it's causing real performance issues that you should consider something to be amiss.

Okay, all that said, let's gather some more information.

First, that 88% number doesn't look correct to me. Your screenshot is sorted in order of memory usage with the highest amount used at the top. The most memory used by anything is 92.6 MB which is nothing in the scheme of things.

Could you please do the following?

Open task manager again, then open the Performance tab and then select Memory. Grab a screenshot.

At the bottom of that screen, click on Open Resource Monitor. Select the memory tab. Make sure that both the Processes and Physical Memory sections are expanded. Wait about 30 seconds so the graphs can populate a little bit, then grab a screenshot.

Open an elevated command prompt, run the following commnand and grab the output.

Code:

wmic memorychip list full
wmic MEMORYCHIP get banklabel, devicelocator, capacity, speed
systeminfo |find "Available Physical Memory"

For this last command, just grab the section the looks like the following image:

Code:

msinfo32 /categories +systemsummary

I cannot run Performance Monitor without administrator rights. I'm trying to get those.

Meanwhile, here is another set of screenshots. However, today the issue is not critical.







The machine is running nothing useful, only mandatory security software and 4 GB are occupied.

The requirements for Windows 10 are 2 GB (64-bit). How would it be if I only had 2 GB? Would Windows try to occupy 4 GB?

Windows dynamically allocates memory, where possible, so, no, it won't try to use 4GB of memory, unless the apps absolutely need that amount of memory. Please note that 2GB is really cutting it tight. Performance will likely be affected with that little memory as Windows will have to swap things in and out of page file more frequently.

CountMike: There was actually logic behind my wanting to gather data the way I had outlined rather than just getting the GUI info.

CountMike said:

I know but issue may pop up in easier to see graphical display first without deeper analysis.

Very true