Why is memory usage so high?

defensie · February 22, 2023

Hey. Ive noticed my ram is always at like 70% although im only using around 12gb, so that means 10gb is coming from thin air.

DigitalGoat · February 22, 2023

36 minutes ago, 8tg said:

Try stopping/disabling the superfetch process in services.msc

Superfetch basically pre caches a bunch of stuff for faster application load times and isn’t vital with an SSD but if you’re running anything off an HDD it’s important.

It also scales with more ram, as it sees it as more space to cache things. I have 64gb of ram and windows will idle at 10-15gb of ram usage with nothing open, disabling superfetch and a few other search indexing tools can drop that back to 3-4gb.

Its also worth nothing you shouldn’t really worry about it much, because it’s one of the first things to be cut when you tap over your physical memory unless you have a massive page file in which case it’ll try and use the page file instead of cutting superfetch allocation.

Superfetch has been changed over time, it is now designed to work with SSDs and can be of benefit, especially on a system with a lower performing CPU, so it is not necessary to disable it.

I also have 64GB RAM and Windows idles at 2 - 3GB in use with nothing open, with Superfetch running.

If more memory needs allocating to a running process then Windows will not just try to use virtual memory first regardless of the pagefile size, it will first try to free up physical RAM (which may include paging some data from other processes out) but it will not need to 'cut back' on superfetch usage, just how much RAM do you think Superfetch uses?

The OP's Taskmanager shows 22.5GB in use, 9.3GB available, 9.4 cached. The cached and the available are the same pool of memory, the cached will be re allocated to an app that requires it, the 22.5GB will then increase by that amount, closing apps will reduce the 22.5GB in use and increase the available and the cached figures.

The best thing the OP can do if they need more free RAM is to reduce the number of processes in use at any one time and/ or buy more memory.

Other than that thier system seems to be working as intended.