What is "Driver Locked", why is it using so much ram, and how do I fix it?

[Mr_Bean]

My PC has 16gb of ram and its using 10gb of ram at idle and that just doesn't seem right. I looked further into it and found that "Driver Locked" is taking up 5 1/2 gb of ram. Does anyone know what it is or how to fix it?

[Eigenvektor]

23 minutes ago, Mr_Bean said:

My PC has 16gb of ram and its using 10gb of ram at idle and that just doesn't seem right. I looked further into it and found that "Driver Locked" is taking up 5 1/2 gb of ram. Does anyone know what it is or how to fix it?

Windows is using RAM to cache stuff, so Windows "using" RAM while idle is completely normal. 10 GB does seem a bit high though. Driver Locked refers to memory that can't be written to the swap file and is "locked" to physical memory. Are you using Hyper-V and/or running virtual machines?

 

Can you show the detailed RAM pages of task manager (under Performance) and the RAM usage by processes in RamMap?

[Bombastinator]

TLDNR: Sadly this post is likely useless to the OP.  It’s just a link to a description of the app mentioned.

 

Id never seen RamMap before.  A description if anyone else is both curious and equally ignorant.  

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-performance-team/introduction-to-the-new-sysinternals-tool-rammap/ba-p/374717

[Mr_Bean]

I dont use any virtual machines or anything like that

[Eigenvektor]

It looks like Windows is using 5.1 GB as cache. Like I said, that's fine. Windows is using this cache to speed up the startup of programs and will make it available to running apps when they need it. You can also try "Resource Monitor" (part of Windows 10), it shows a bit more detail than Task Manager. If you sum up the use by running programs (e.g. Chrome, Discord, ...) it should probably work out to the remaining 5.3 GB that is shown as used.

[Mr_Bean]

Ok, my bad, I recently purchased primocache and gave it 5gb of ram as cache instead of just my ssd. oops