Windows 10 refuses to use all of my RAM

LMiller7 said:

You are misinterpreting the graph. Task Manager shows 4.6 GB RAM available but the larger part of this is on the standby list. This is very much misunderstood. It acts as a kind of cache and is a major contributor to good performance. But while it is doing that it is also considered as available memory for immediate use by any application that needs it. It is better than free memory. Free memory is like keeping cash in a jar at home. It does nobody any good until it is used. Standby memory is like money in a high interest savings account that can be immediately withdrawn at any time without penalty. In this case the interest is performance. Remember this is only an analogy to illustrate how things work. Don't take the analogy too far.

Windows memory manager tries very hard to maintain a reasonable balance between in use memory and the standby list in an attempt to maximize performance. This is VERY complex. You don't ever want the graph to show 100% usage. That would mean there is nothing on the standby list and that would be death to performance.

Only the section of the graph to the far right is that evil free memory. In this case it appears to be less than 2 GB. Windows tries very hard to keep this small, zero being the optimum value. But under real world conditions this often isn't possible. On my 8 GB system this is often zero but with more memory that becomes more difficult to achieve.

The commit limit is for practical purposes RAM size plus pagefile size. With no pagefile it will be somewhat less than RAM size. Windows will never allow the commit charge to exceed this limit. When the limit would be exceeded by a memory allocation you will get the out of memory error. This effectively limits your workload. This limit can occur even when there is plenty of available or even free memory. This does not mean that Windows is in some way holding memory back. That isn't the problem.

Bottom line is you need a pagefile.

Then it works exactly as I suspected, I just had no idea Windows had a bare minimum it needed to cache.

dalchina said:

Great explanation!



Please post a screenshot like this so we can see your page file settings. Thanks.
To post a screenshot please use the Insert Image icon above your post.

I already stated in #3, it's disabled. (no paging file)

Thanks to everyone for the answers :)