Issue with the standby memory | Windows 10

SlyWolf · March 5, 2019

Alright, so where do I begin.

I've noticed that one of my games, which I have not touched for a while, has huge performance issues(framerate drops and stutters mainly). In the past, it was running smoothly at 154 fps locked(I have144hz panel); however, today it was constantly dropping to 110-90 with frame times that are all over the place. I decided to figure out what's up.

The first look at the task manager revealed the problem. Even though I have 16 Gb of ram and chrome+steam+os doesn't need more than ~4.5Gb, I only had ~3Gb of free ram available. About 8Gb of it was used as standby memory preloaded with some stuff I was not currently using. After that, I checked my pagefile, which by default was set to 8Gb. After some googling, I assumed that windows was using "virtual ram" instead of clearing up the junk in the standby portion, so I decreased the size of pagefile to min/max 1Gb/2Gb and rebooted the system.

After the restart, the overall usage of ram dropped. On idle it was around 2.5Gb and the reserved portion was only 1.8Gb. A quick test of the game showed that everything went back to normal, no performance issues.

Despite this, I kept monitoring memory usage. After I exited the game, standby was about 5-6Gb, which is about what that game needs to run. When I opened another application, the standby portion was growing until it reached the max(~8Gb was used, ~9Gb standby) and the program crashed with not enough memory error. I believe that a portion of that standby memory was used by the game data and the rest by other stuff windows preloaded in case I might use it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this mean that standby memory is not freed when an active application requires it? Why is windows not removing closed program's data from RAM?

I've downloaded RamMap and manually cleared standby, but this is not a solution.
After I've released standby portion, I tried to play Apex. Background stuff+the game are actively using ~8Gb, and when you're playing standby steadily grows until it fills all available ram, which causes the game to crash.

P.s: I also disabled Superfetch, but it still preloads stuff during the first boot.
I've attached a screenshot of the task manager. With just chrome open - 3.6Gb used\9GB!!!! reserved. If I try to launch a program, it'd better be happy with those 3gb left over, cause standby portion is not counted as free memory.

ram.bmp

Added 2 screenshots:

Just apex running after releasing standby memory
And after I closed it

apexclosed.bmp

runningapex.bmp

SlyWolf · March 6, 2019

UPD: I played until the game crashed with MSI Afterburner monitoring tools on. Looks like it crashes when pagefile grows over 19Gb. WTF
Why is it using pagefile when half of the ram is supposedly free?
Why does pagefile go over 19Gb when I manually set it to the 2Gb max?

I have so many questions...

gamecrash.bmp