Memory compression seems to be disabled - should I enable it?  

Hi,

I'm currently doing some maintenence on a friends laptop. I've upgraded the RAM and am also going to put an SSD in there which should dramatically improve performance. (It's only a Celeron!)

Thing is I've noticed that in Task Manager under the Performance tab and Memory, it always says "0MB" compressed. I've never seen it say this on Windows 10 before.

Is this likely disabled by Windows due to the processor limitations, or has it been disabled some way accidentally?

Also if possible to enable it, would you recommend doing so? I've boosted the RAM from 6GB to 12 but wondering if it will improve performance if it stops disk activity with paging. I know in theory it should be doing this less with double the RAM but I just don't know if the compressed memory seemingly being off is causing any slowdowns.

Thanks

Hi, you can check the state of memory compression (enabled or not) thus:


Disable-MMAgent -mc
disables it

Enable-MMAgent -mc
enables it

This
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...9-048758f998d2

suggests a possible cause.

I found what was causing the issue.
Superfetch as disabled and service was not set to automatic.

@dalchina

Excellent, just what I was looking for, I'll run that command to check the status of the compression and see what it says.

Thanks

I get the same PS report as dalchina.

What is "Compressed memory"? never heard of it, my screenshot says all of the memory currently used is "compressed"

Virtual memory compression - Wikipedia
Memory Compression Process: High Memory and CPU Usage in Windows 10 | Windows OS Hub

zebal said:

What is "Compressed memory"? never heard of it,

If you have half an hour to waste, this a pretty interesting video. Good for falling asleep.

Memory Compression in Windows 10 RTM | Seth Juarez | Channel 9

dalchina said:

Virtual memory compression - Wikipedia

Wiki quote:

The footprint of the data being paged is reduced by the compression process; in the first instance, the freed RAM is returned to the available physical memory pool, while the compressed portion is kept in RAM. In the second instance, the compressed data is sent to auxiliary storage but the resulting I/O operation is smaller and therefore takes less time.

Looks like we get more performance when memory is compressed to "auxiliary" storage (ex. SSD), while compression to physical RAM gives less performance. (for RAM, IMO no performance at all)

TairikuOkami said:

If you have half an hour to waste, this a pretty interesting video. Good for falling asleep.

Memory Compression in Windows 10 RTM | Seth Juarez | Channel 9

I'll definitely watch this once, tnx!

zebal said:

What is "Compressed memory"? never heard of it, my screenshot says all of the memory currently used is "compressed"

The compressed part is in parentheses.

Berton said:

The compressed part is in parentheses.

Ah, that makes so much more sense!

Because I watched that channel9 video, and when it ended up I could still not understand why all of the memory is compressed since the guy says compression is more aggressive with low memory devices such as mobile phones, tablets etc.

It makes sense also because for so few compressed memory there really isn't any reason to turn this feature off.
turning it off would make these pages go to disk directly (instead of into RAM) and also uncompressed which would increase disk usage.

At least that's my understanding.