Windows 10 Pro upgrade plus Hyper-V turned on equals high memory usage

I upgraded Windows 10 Home to Pro a few days ago. Then I turned on Hyper-V.

Now my memory is being used at 85-95% without any dips. In Task Mgr I see a bunch of processes are loaded into memory with small individual footprints, but the overall is obviously unacceptable. (See image attachment.) MalwareBytes Premium is installed - it's not new but it is sitting there near the top of the memory-using processes so could be a factor(?)



My question is: Is this normal for Pro and Hyper-V (or one of the two), or is some sort of update process occurring that is burning up all my RAM? It's been going like this for three days now. If the only solution is to buy more RAM then so be it, but I don't want to drop a hundred bucks if I don't have to. (Pro already cost me that much.)

If you're curious, my goal in upgrading was to be able to have an Android emulator I could develop an app with in Visual Studio.

Thanks in advance.

How much ram do you have installed now?

jonnied12 said:

How much ram do you have installed now?

8GB

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I'll update with the following.

I did turn off Hyper-V and the framework in Windows features and rebooted, which made the memory usage go way down, so I'm confident that is what was draining the memory.

Unless an expert tells me otherwise I'll conclude that I need more RAM. I'll watch for more replies.

Open task manager > click performance tab > click memory > post images into the thread

Just a moment...

Screenshot - e58e274fe6ad7178f8f643badaaba996 - Gyazo - RAMMap

dugdugdug said:

8GB

...I did turn off Hyper-V and the framework in Windows features and rebooted, which made the memory usage go way down, so I'm confident that is what was draining the memory.
Unless an expert tells me otherwise I'll conclude that I need more RAM. I'll watch for more replies.

The Processes tab in Task Manager is misleading you, I think. Just enabling Hyper-V uses no more memory that without it. What eats your memory is running a VM.

The '% Memory' column in Task Manager is showing only the processes of your host OS, and the % in use is calculated in relation to RAM that is allocated to your host OS. My 8GB Win Pro machine with Hyper-V enabled hovers around 32% memory use with no VMs running.

BUT when I start up a VM with 4GB RAM assigned to it, then the RAM allocated to the host OS goes down to 4GB, and as a consequence, even though the host isn't running any more processes than before, the % in use immediately doubles to 64%. In order to run a VM you have to take RAM away from the host and give it to the VM.

A better guide to how your memory is being used is on the Performance tab. Here's what happens when I start a VM which uses 4GB, then stop it again.



If you are permanently using most of your RAM then is sounds like you have a VM running without realising it. Open Hyper-V Manager and check. It's quite easy to inadvertently configure a VM to start when your machine boots up. Check the settings for each of your VMs and look at 'Automatic Start Action' and 'Automatic Stop Action'.

I find my 8GB more than enough for one Windows 10 VM, and two can run comfortably at the same time as long as they are set to use dynamic memory.

Kari is the Hyper-V expert here, and there's a whole section on using and configuring Virtual RAM in his tutorial here....

Hyper-V - Optimizing Virtual Machines

zbook said:

Open task manager > click performance tab > click memory > post images into the thread

Just a moment...

Screenshot - e58e274fe6ad7178f8f643badaaba996 - Gyazo - RAMMap

I will do this when I get a moment to test Hyper-V again. I need to work with the machine right now so there will be a slight delay in providing the screenshot.

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Bree said:

The Processes tab in Task Manager is misleading you, I think. Just enabling Hyper-V uses no more memory that without it. What eats your memory is running a VM.

The '% Memory' column in Task Manager is showing only the processes of your host OS, and the % in use is calculated in relation to RAM that is allocated to your host OS. My 8GB Win Pro machine with Hyper-V enabled hovers around 32% memory use with no VMs running.

BUT when I start up a VM with 4GB RAM assigned to it, then the RAM allocated to the host OS goes down to 4GB, and as a consequence, even though the host isn't running any more processes than before, the % in use immediately doubles to 64%. In order to run a VM you have to take RAM away from the host and give it to the VM.

A better guide to how your memory is being used is on the Performance tab. Here's what happens when I start a VM which uses 4GB, then stop it again.



If you are permanently using most of your RAM then is sounds like you have a VM running without realising it. Open Hyper-V Manager and check. It's quite easy to inadvertently configure a VM to start when your machine boots up. Check the settings for each of your VMs and look at 'Automatic Start Action' and 'Automatic Stop Action'.

I find my 8GB more than enough for one Windows 10 VM, and two can run comfortably at the same time as long as they are set to use dynamic memory.

Kari is the Hyper-V expert here, and there's a whole section on using and configuring Virtual RAM in his tutorial here....

Hyper-V - Optimizing Virtual Machines

That all makes sense but I was not running a VM as far as I could tell. I only created one (a pre-supplied Ubuntu installation), then deleted it when I was done. No other machines showed in the Hyper-V manager.

dugdugdug said:

That all makes sense but I was not running a VM as far as I could tell. I only created one (a pre-supplied Ubuntu installation), then deleted it when I was done. No other machines showed in the Hyper-V manager.

Well, all I can say it that just adding Hyper-V in Windows Features does not in itself use any more RAM than with it disabled.

The processes shown in your screenshot add up to 743.6MB, and even if the ones not shown take that total up to 1GB it would only be 12.5% of your 8GB RAM. To be some 90% of the available RAM that implies something else is reserving up to 7GB to itself. The only thing I can think of that could explain it is if RAM was being reserved for a running VM.

What does the memory look like on Task Manager's Performance tab?

The bottom line is that your 8GB RAM should more than enough to support running a Hyper-V VM, it is for me. And when no VM is running memory use on the Processes tab should be the same as it would be without Hyper-V installed, around 20-30% (a bit more when you open other apps such as your Google Chrome). That's how my machine behaves.

I believe you but that's not what I'm seeing on my machine. I will turn Hyper-V and the framework back on and see what happens though. And I'll post images after I do.

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Ok I turned the Hyper-V and Windows Hypervisor Platform back on and rebooted. Memory usage was about 37%. Good so far.

Then I created a VM loaded with one of the Ubuntu installations preselected in the dialog. My memory usage went up to 90%. I checked the settings on the VM to see how much RAM was allocated and it's only 2 GB, although dynamic is turned on.

Does that sound normal? Because if it is I'll still need more RAM if I actually want to run a VM, even if it isn't used by Hyper-V alone. I'm attaching a couple screenshots. Let me know if you need more.

That makes sense then. I just assumed the Ubuntu installation would be set up to use memory efficiently, but even when I attached that image of the settings I wondered about the upper limit of the dynamic memory range being awfully high.

Thanks! I think this solves my problem. I appreciate the assistance.